Prof. Dr. Kerem Öktem (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Political Science and International Relations)
Kerem Öktem is a Professor of Politics and International Relations at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the founding chair of the Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey. In October 2024, he joined the Orient-Institut as a Senior Research Associated Researcher. His expertise lies in the politics and international relations of Turkey, with a particular focus on the intersection of local and global politics, citizenship policies, and state-minority relations. Two of his more recent books are Turkish Jews and Their Diasporas: Entanglements and Separations (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), co-edited with Ipek Yosmaoğlu (Northwestern University), which examines the transnational dynamics of Turkish Jewish communities, and Exit from Democracy: Illiberal Governance in Turkey and Beyond (Routledge, 2018). More recently, Prof. Öktem has dedicated his research to exploring the cultural politics of autocratization in Turkey and its diasporas, analyzing the interplay between cultural narratives and authoritarian practices. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, where he completed his Dr.Phil in Political Geography in 2006, and from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, where he earned an MA in Urban and Regional Planning in 1994.
oktem@oiist.org / kerem.oktem@unive.it
Dr. habil. Martin Greve
Martin Greve is a German ethnomusicologist based in Istanbul and Beirut. His doctoral thesis deals with the history of Turkish Art Music in the 20th century. His habilitation thesis is a study of Turkish music in Germany. From 2005 to 2011 Dr. Greve was the coordinator of the Study Program of Turkish Music at the Rotterdam World Music Academy. From 2011 to 2018, Martin Greve was a research associate at the Orient-Institut Istanbul responsible for the research field Music in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Since December 2020, he is directing the DFG-funded research project entitled “Migration, Memory, and Musical Expression: Musical Traditions from Central Eastern Anatolian Turkey, Berlin, and Paris” at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, together with Dr. Dilek Soileau.
Dr. Hülya Adak
Hülya Adak is a Senior Research Associate at the Orient Institut Istanbul der Max Weber Stiftung and Visiting Professor of Gender Studies at the Margherita von Brentano Zentrum at Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2019 and 2022, she was the Director of SU Gender (Sabancı University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Center). Since 2018, she has served as Professor of Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2001 and 2024, she served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Sabancı University. She is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers and Newton Grant (British Academy, with Murat Akser). Her articles in the fields of gender studies, memory and trauma studies, empire studies and nationalism, history of human rights, literature, theatre, and film studies have been published in prominent journals. Her recent works include Critical Perspectives on Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (Routledge 2023, with Müge Göçek and Ron Suny), Mapping Gender: What’s New and What’s Ahead in Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Max Weber Stiftung Publications 2022, with Richard Wittmann); Performing Turkishness: Politics of Theater in Turkey and its Diasporas (Special Issue of Comparative Drama 2018, with R. Ertuğ Altınay), Halide Edib and Political Violence: The Armenian Atrocities, Dictatorship and Nonviolence (Bilgi University Press 2016, in Turkish), Hundert Jahre Türkei: Von Revolten, Träumen und Hoffnungen (Unionsverlag Zurich 2010, with Erika Glassen). She is currently working on the book Afterlives of Archives (with Melanie Tanielian and Erdağ Göknar) that received the Duke University Franklin Humanities Institute’s Book Manuscript Award in 2021.
Dr. Audrey Wozniak
Audrey M. Wozniak received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology with a secondary concentration in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. Focusing on the politics of belonging, Wozniak’s work lies at the intersection of social theory (especially critical, feminist, postcolonial, and the post-Anthropocene) with music and sound studies. She is interested in how sound and space are imbricated in individual and collective negotiations of boundaries—of the self, identities, histories, nations, modernity, etc.—and emerge in the organization of people, work, and lived environments. One of her ongoing projects is a monograph examining the outsized role of the state in producing the dominant “amateur-professional” dichotomy underpinning the institutions and hierarchies of today’s Turkish music industry.
Much of Wozniak’s work is defined by engagement with performance ethnography, artistic research, and public outreach as a musician-scholar working in the creative industries of Türkiye, Europe, and the United States. Trained as a Western classical violinist, she has spent nearly a decade learning Turkish classical makam-based music through working with master musicians. She has served as an academic expert and musical guest on five Turkish National Radio and Television (TRT) programs, curates a popular social media channel featuring educational and artistic content related to her cross-cultural research and musical work and is the creator and host of a musical travel documentary series for TRT.