Assoc. Prof. Umut Uzer

Biography

Umut Uzer is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Istanbul Technical University. He works on the impact of nationalism, identity and state-building in the Middle East and the Caucasus. He has published on Turkish foreign policy, Turkish nationalism, Israeli-Turkish relations and Arab perceptions of the Cold War in Middle East Policy, Israel Affairs, Turkish Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, The Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, and Perceptions. He is the author of two books:

An Intellectual History of Turkish nationalism: Between Turkish ethnicity and Islamic identity. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016.

Identity and Turkish foreign policy: The Kemalist influence in Cyprus and the Caucasus published by I.B. Tauris in 2011. 

For his doctoral studies, he attended University of Virginia, where he has written his Ph.D. dissertation with William Quandt. He has a Master’s degree from Middle East Technical University and a Bachelor’s degree from Bilkent University in the field of international relations.  He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 2007 and 2010 where he started writing his book on Turkish Nationalism.

Uzer has taught at Smith College, University of Maryland University College, Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY), University of Utah, Boğaziçi University, Doğuş University and Eastern Mediterranean University. He was affiliated with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a major think tank in Brussels and was a visiting professor at University of Antwerp. Earlier, he was a research assistant at Foreign Policy Institute, Ankara researching the Middle East peace process and the Arab-Israeli conflict.