Esra Özyürek is an associate professor and the chair of contemporary Turkish studies at the European Institute, London School of Economics. Her research concerns secularism and Islam, ideologies of state and citizenship, productions of public and private, alternative modernities, and social and cultural memory in Turkey and Europe. She is the author of Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Duke University Press, 2006) and of several scholarly articles. She edited Politics of Public Memory: Production and Consumption of the Past in Turkey, and the Turkish-language volume Remembering and Forgetting: Social Memory in Turkey (Iletisim, 2001). Prior, to her position at LSE, Özyürek was an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and was a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. After earning her BA in political science and sociology at Bogazici University, Istanbul, she went on to receive her MA and PhD (2002) in anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.