I am a political anthropologist and historian and since 2017 am Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. I study the political wherever I find it, whether it’s in the institutions of states, aspirations for sovereignty, practices of bordering, or the lives of displaced peoples. Much of my work has focused on temporality and the future, as I see the promises and hopes attached to states and sovereignties as critical to understanding political lives. My historical and ethnographic research has concentrated on the Eastern Mediterranean, especially the divided island of Cyprus and Turkey. I’ve studied how Cypriots displaced over decades and young Syrian refugees living in Turkey plan their lives in conditions of uncertainty. I’ve asked how citizens of de facto states live without recognition and what their desires for sovereign agency tell us about similar desires in recognized states. I have a longstanding interest in the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean present. Throughout my work, I’ve used this post-imperial space to challenge the hegemony of Western European colonialism in the study of empire. My current research examines foreign infrastructural investment as a new form of imperialism that gestures towards former empires while constructing multipolar futures.
 
I studied Philosophy (B.A.) and Cultural Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Chicago and have since held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo. I have also taught as a Fulbright fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and as a visiting professor at Middle East Technical University's Cyprus campus. I have held affiliations as an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Professorial Research Fellow in the European Institute of the London School of Economics.

My work has been funded by four Fulbrights, two grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and grants and fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education (U.S.), among others. In the U.K., I have received grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council. In 2002-3, I was a Fellow of the Cornell University Society of Fellows, and in 2005-6 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

I am currently the Principal Investigator of a five-year European Research Council Advanced Grant, "Infrastructural Imperialism: Global 'Big Brothers' and Geopolitical Futures." For the project, I lead a team of six researchers studying Turkish infrastructural investments in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.