Deniz Ilhan is a visiting graduate student fellow at Center for Democracy, Toleration and Religion at University of California, Berkeley.

Biography

Deniz Ilhan is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stony Brook University, Department of Sociology in New York, and is currently working on his dissertation thesis titled “Making Space in the Conversation: Muslims in Turkey’s Intellectual Field since 1980.”

Drawing on archival research, his study comparatively examines the interactions, content productions, curricular and research operations of select intellectual magazines, academic journals, educational think-tanks, and universities in Turkey since 1980, which are founded and led predominantly by Muslims. The analysis seeks to explain how these Muslim platforms strive to increase their institutional presence and influence over the agenda in Turkey, and what factors distinguish the successful. The study builds upon the sociology of intellectuals, knowledge and ideas, and the multi-disciplinary area studies on the Muslim intellectual space in general, and Turkish in particular.

Since September 2016, Deniz has been co-facilitating the weekly Middle East and North Africa Salons held at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, where recent developments or chronic issues of the region are discussed based on pre-assigned readings. Deniz has a Master’s degree from the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in which studied the multinational corporation professionals and cosmopolitanization in a globalizing city context: Istanbul, based on in-depth interviews.