DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Ekin Kurtiç (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2019) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is at the intersection of political anthropology, materiality and infrastructure studies, political ecology, and environmental history. She is the 2022-2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Previously, she was a Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies.

Her current book manuscript, Sedimented Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies in the Çoruh Basin, critically examines state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building in Turkey. Sedimented Landscapes shows that dam building is a central site of governing the socio-material space and enacting state power not only through environmental conquest but also through conservation. By tracing the role of the sediment carried by river waters in dammed landscapes, her book analyzes the making of state power, techno-environmental expertise, and future rural life through the governance of infrastructure and ecology. Kurtiç is also developing a new book project on the techno-ecopolitics of reframing soil as a "carbon sink" serving to mitigate the climate crisis and its implications for human and non-human lives in agricultural and pastoral landscapes of Turkey. Her work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Environment and Planning D, Middle East Research and Information Project, and Project on Middle East Political Science.