Ayse Neveser Koker

Nev is a PhD candidate in political theory, and a certificate student in Women’s Studies. She is interested in how political ideas travel across cultural, social, and geographical borders. Her dissertation project, “Gendering “East” and “West:” Transnational Politics of Belonging in France and the Ottoman Empire (1718-1905),” explores how ideas about political membership and belonging circulated between France and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Working within a historical-literary framework, she studies texts that depict or imagine encounters between the two countries as snapshots of this politically and culturally fraught alliance. Her research highlights how gendered tropes used by French and Ottoman authors facilitated the creation of a “transnational political imaginary.” She is one of the recipients of 2015 Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies.

Nev also has pedagogical interests in how different forms of media (audiovisual materials, digital writing platforms) can be used to cultivate classroom environments that will foster student’s critical, creative, and autonomous thinking capabilities. She has served as a graduate student instructor for a number of political theory courses, and as a graduate student mentor. She is a 2015 Junior Fellow in the Sweetland Center for Writing’s Fellows Seminar.

Field(s) of Study

• History of Political Thought (18th and 19th century)
  Feminist Political Theory
  Comparative Political Theory