EUME
2020/ 2021

Zeynep Türkyilmaz

An Archaeology of Today: Tracing the Genealogies of Yezidi Victimhood

Previous Fellowships: 2019/ 2020, 2018/ 2019, 2017/ 2018, 2010/ 2011

received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. Her dissertation, “Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire,” is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British, and several American missionary archives. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009 and2010 and a postdoctoral EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in 2010/11. She worked as an Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College between 2011 and 2016 and as a program coordinator and research fellow at Koc University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations finishing her book project based on her dissertation. Her research and teaching interests include state formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and religion with a focus on heterodoxy and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present. She returned as a EUME Fellow for the academic year of 2017/18 and continues to be with EUME in the academic years 2018-21 as a Fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien associated with the Center for Global History at Freie Universität Berlin.

2017-2021

An Archaeology of Today: Tracing the Genealogies of Yezidi Victimhood

This project is a longue durée study of Yezidi victimization and their narratives, tracing their manifold manifestations from the 1700s until the 2014 genocide. It is essentially a critique of ahistorical and uniform characterizations of Yezidis as an ever-persecuted people. Informed by Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, which enforces an inquiry of multi-dimensional, multi-linear processes formed by discontinuities, contingencies and the choices of actors, thus opening up the possibility of dissonant discourses, this project brings into light the complexities of Yezidi agency and actorship. Drawing on extensive archival research and recently published oral testimonies of survivors, this project moves away from the portrayal of Yezidis as meek, passive, converted and persecuted peoples, and study them as local rulers and powerbrokers between empires; armed and resilient, fighting back on their Sunni neighbors’ intrusions, sometimes initiating attacks, and always resisting state attempts to infiltrate in matters relating to their identity as well their socio-economic well-being, conscription, and taxation. The focus is on their demands and responses to the introduction of citizenship as well as the redefinition of communal coexistence in their local settings at the remote, high-altitude corners of these political entities. In so doing, Zeynep Türkyilmaz hopes to illustrate how Yezidi subjecthood has been reshaped at the intersection of modernizing empires and nation-states.

2010/ 2011

Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire

As a EUME Fellow 2010/ 2011, she will expand her research and focus on revising her dissertation into a book manuscript.