Associate Professor; Center on Forced Displacement, Affiliate Faculty; on leave fall 2024

Website

https://bu.academia.edu/AyseParla

Areas of Expertise

Historical anthropology. Political Anthropology. Genocide Studies.  Ethnography of historicity; temporalities; phenomenology of time, intellectual cultural history and the memoir; empirical fabulation; im/mobilities; differentiated citizenship; anthropology of emotions; anthropology of hope. Türkiye, its borders, and its diasporas.

View Professor Parla’s CV – November 2024

About

My first book, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey, explores the tension between ethnic privilege and economic precarity through a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with Turkish migrants from Bulgaria as they navigate legal and bureaucratic spheres, as well as the complexities of cultural belonging. The broader theoretical intervention is a rethinking of hope, not as an unequivocal good beyond critique, but, inspired by thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Terry Eagleton and poets such as Yeats and Dickinson, as having an ambivalent nature: I argue that hope can enable or disable, inspire or obscure, depending on its context, object, and justifications. My current book manuscript combines biographical cultural history, literary criticism, historical anthropology, and ethnography to examine the art of living as a Verabrogh (survivor) in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and within the postgenocidal landscape of Istanbul/Bolis through close readings of the memoirs of four public intellectuals and writers.

Selected Publications

  • 2025    “Hope and Migration.” Invited Contribution to the Oxford Compendium on Hope, eds. Anthony Scioli & Steven van den Heuvel. Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • 2023    “Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65 (2):446 – 470
  • 2019    Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Association of Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) Book Prize in Critical Anthropology, Honorable Mention

Courses

  • CAS AN220 Urban Anthropology
  • CAS AN307/707 Anthropology of Turkey and the Middle East
  • CAS AN462 Ethnography and Anthropological Theory 2
  • CAS AN571 Anthropology of Emotion
  • Seminar: Migration and Im/mobilities