Ayca Arkilic

Biography

Ayca Arkilic is a senior lecturer in comparative politics at Victoria University of Wellington. She received her Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Arkilic published her first book, Diaspora Diplomacy: The Politics of Turkish Emigration to Europe (Manchester University Press), in 2022. This book has been chosen as one of the Top Ten Books of 2023 for International Women’s Day by International Affairs. She is currently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Turkey’s Diasporas with Banu Senay. This handbook will be the first on the topic and include chapters on diaspora politics, transnational dynamics, arts, culture, literature, and food practices.

Arkilic is the recipient of various awards, such as the Richard Gillespie Mediterranean Best Research Article Prize, the Victoria Early Career Research Excellence Award, and the Victoria Early Career Teaching Excellence Award. Between 2013 and 2015, she was a Chateaubriand Fellow at Sciences Po, a visiting researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center, and an Imam Tirmizi Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies. Arkilic serves as associate editor of Diaspora Studies and sits on the International Advisory Board of Mediterranean Politics. She is also one of the founding members of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Aotearoa network that brings together more than sixty scholars and graduate students interested in Islamic studies in New Zealand.

At the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), Arkilic will work on a project on Turkey's engagement with diaspora youth in Europe.

This information is accurate for the time period that the visiting scholar is affiliated with CES.

Affiliations

• Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington
• Visiting Scholar 2023-2024, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University