Banu Turnaoğlu

Dr. Banu Turnaoğlu is a lecturer in History at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She was a Tübitak fellow under the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Co-fund Program at Sabancı University. Before joining Sabancı University, she was an affiliated lecturer and held a postdoctoral position as an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, from whence she received her PhD. She held an MSc in Political Theory from the University of Oxford; and a BA in International Relations and History (double major) from Koç University.

As a historian of political thought, her main research interests lie in the topics of republicanism, constitutionalism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and related questions concerning the nature and genesis of the modern state and modern international order, linking pre-existing patterns of political development with contemporary events. She is the author of The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in leading journals, including Global Intellectual History, Max Weber Studies, History of Political Thought, Modern Intellectual History, and Middle Eastern Studies. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, The Eastern Question: A New History (under contract with Princeton University Press), and Positivism, Anti-imperialism and Republicanism: The Political Thought of Ahmed Rıza (under contract with Cambridge University Press), and co-editing a volume entitled Global Constitutionalism: Non-Western Perspectives (under contract with Cambridge University Press).  She is a winner of the 2023 Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award.