Middle East Studies

Yasemin Bavbek, 2023-24 Mellon-GIS Teaching Fellow at Connecticut College

June 12, 2023

Congratulations
Yasemin Bavbek, 2023-24 Mellon-GIS Teaching Fellow at Connecticut College

Connecticut College Global Islamic Studies Program has partnered with Brown University's Center for Middle East Studies in a faculty and graduate student exchange program. The program allows Connecticut College professors to spend a funded semester at Brown training in a new area as well as bringing advanced graduate students from Brown to Connecticut's campus to teach new courses that will expand the Global Islamic Studies curriculum. Three Brown graduate students have benefited from an opportunity to teach their own course at the college since 2019.


N. Yasemin Bavbek is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Brown University. Her research and teaching interests are in sociology of empires, education, and humanitarianism, with a particular focus on transnational networks between New England and the Middle East. Her dissertation project, Exporting New England Evangelism to Asia Minor: Extraterritoriality, American Education and Humanitarianism in the Late Ottoman Empire, addresses how inter-imperial and transnational relations shape local experiences, institutions, and power dynamics. This research shifts focus from the state to civil society actors embodying the American Empire in specific ways, deepening our understanding of how trans-imperial processes shape civil society and undergird national institutions.