Erdal Küçükyalçın (Visiting Scholar in 2021-2022)
Dr. Küçükyalçın has completed his Ph.D. at Boğaziçi University, Dept. of History in the field of Japanese History. At present, he is giving lectures at the Asian Studies Center in the same university on various subjects including Asian history, Japanese history, Japanese Management Techniques and Know-how – Art of War and Strategic Leadership, History of Writing, and Japanese Translation. He is also the founder of “Musashi Dojo – School of Creative Leadership” at Japanese Art Center, where he teaches shodo (calligraphy) in combination with Bushido (Way of the Samurai). Dr. Küçükyalçın is the editor-in-chief of “Global Perspectives on Japan”, a yearly academic journal in English and the author of the following books in Turkish: Miyamoto Musashi and the Book of Five Rings – On Art of War and Leadership (2021), The Samurai (2019), The Book of Five Rings – Art of War and Strategic Leadership (2017), The Age of the Samurai – Milestones of Japanese History (2013), Count Otani Kozui and Turkey (2010), The Heart of the Crane–Janissary Brotherhood and the Order of Bektashism (2010), and a historical novel The Seven Towers – Why was Sultan Osman the Young was Killed?(2013).
Mina Kozluca is a research assistant in the Koç-Renmin Joint Seed Fund project titled “The Growth and Structural Effects of the Belt and Road Initiative on the Turkish Economy.” Kozluca is a prospective Ph.D. student in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has recently gained an MSc degree in Development Studies from SOAS, the University of London, as a Jean Monnet Scholar. Kozluca completed her bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Sociology at Koç University in 2019. Her research interests include the political economy of development, agrarian change and development, and labor studies. Kozluca’s paper (co-authored with Burak Gürel) titled “The Unrest and Relative Empowerment of the Working Class in Contemporary China” was published in the METU Studies in Development in 2019.
Burcu Ermeydan (Visiting Scholar in 2020-21)
Burcu Ermeydan is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Kadir Has University, where she is also working as a research assistant. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus. In her master’s thesis, she studied financial regionalism in East Asia. During her graduate years, she worked as a teaching assistant and assisted two different research projects on economic history. Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis at Kadir Has University with focusing on the overlapping regionalism in shaping economic regionalism in East Asia. She has authored three book chapters on East Asian regionalism, and she is working on new studies on ASEAN, regional cooperation in East Asia and reflection of Asian studies in Turkey. Her research areas are international political economy, regionalism in international relations, East Asian politics and research methods in social sciences.
Emek Yılmaz (Visiting Scholar in 2020-21)
Esra Gökçe Şahin has completed her Ph.D. in social anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She has been conducting research on performance, media, and creative industries with a focus on memory politics, semiotics and gender in Japan. Şahin taught undergraduate level courses on anthropology of media, digital platforms, and linguistic anthropology. She also taught graduate level courses on subjects as media, publicity, and gender performance in Japan. Additionally, Şahin is trained as a performer of traditional Japanese comedy, rakugo, and she held stage performances in various venues in Tokyo.As an ethnographic filmmaker, Şahin is interested in exploring the sensory modes of communication, memory and representation. Şahin has forthcoming articles based on the anthropological analysis of memory politics and gender in contemporary Japan, reflected through the critical lens of rakugo humor. She is also working on her book manuscript, Rakugo Humor: Memory Politics and Japan’s Urban Laughter.
Sırma Altun (Visiting Scholar in 2020-21)
Sirma Altun is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Economy, The University of Sydney.Her research looks at the production of urban space in Hong Kong and Taipei, two global cities inAsia. She explores top-down and differential dynamics of global city formation inHong Kong and Taipei from spatial political economy perspective
Joel Andreas (Visiting Scholar in Spring 2020)
Joel Andreas is a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include political contention, social inequality, and social change in contemporary China. Andreas served as the director of the East Asian Studies Program at Johns Hopkins from 2011 to 2013. He teaches social theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as courses on political sociology and contemporary Chinese society. He has held visiting positions at the University of Sydney, the University of Adelaide, and Hong Kong University. His first book titled Rise of the red engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the origins of China’s new class was published by Stanford University Press in 2009. His second book, Disenfranchised: The rise and fall of industrial citizenship in China, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
For more information on Andreas’s work: https://soc.jhu.edu/