Professor Esra Ozyurek joined University of Cambridge after having taught at the London School of Economics and University of California, San Deigo. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan and prior to that she received a completed her undergraduate degree in Sociology and Political Science at Bogazici University, Istanbul.

Research Interests

Secularism, Christianity, Islam, liberalism, and democracy are among seemingly universalist worldviews, inviting any individual, community, or government to embrace them. However, they are also considered indigenous to certain geographies and populations and foreign imports to others. My overall research agenda explores this tension between the universalism and particularism of globally appealing religious and post-religious belief and value systems by studying them ethnographically as they travel in and out of their assumed natural habitats. More specifically, as an anthropologist, I am interested in the personal experiences of individuals who embrace a universalistic ideology or belief system that they did not inherit from their grandparents, but instead choose to borrow from others and make their own, with a specific focus on Islam and Muslims. I explore what it means to be a secular Turk in a country where political Islam is on the rise; to be an ethnic German who converted to Islam; and a Turk who converted to Christianity. I am currently working on a project about Muslim background Germans who look for ways to adopt the memory of the Holocaust as proof of their commitment to liberal democracy and empathic humanity. I examine the conditions under which such engagements are judged as genuine and sincere, or as suspect and fake.

Each individual choice of adopting a worldview, belief system, or lifestyle that one did not inherit reveals that moving in and out of seemingly opposing worldviews is quite possible, and indeed quite common. At the same time, the particular challenges these individuals face give us clues about how humans make and remake divisions in the first place. While overlooked, individual acts of borrowing across genealogies are fundamental to the formation and transformation of these alignments. Importantly, consequences of conversion are independent of whether or not the individual converts with a political motivation. The acts of conversion I study explore the nature of porous boundaries between Islam and Christianity; religion and non-religion; democracy and authoritarianism; Turkey and Europe.

Esra holds the Sultan Qaboos Chair in Abrahamic Faiths & Shared Values. She is also Academic Director of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, a research centre committed to cross-sector engagement and knowledge exchange, and a director of Cambridge’s Global Humanities Initiative.