Serkan Yolaçan’s research broadly focuses on the interplay of past and present in the lives of individuals, diasporas, and states. In all his projects, Yolaçan combines broad space and deep history empirically, and history and anthropology methodologically, to generate geo-historical frames that speak to questions of human mobility, international order, and social change.

His book project, Time Travelers: Pasts and Possibilities in the Caucasus, weaves the modern experiences of Turkey, Iran, and Russia through the lens of a diasporic people from the region of Azerbaijan. By placing mobile Azeris at the center of three major states, he ties together their near-synchronous transformations from constitutional revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century to expansionist agendas in the twenty-first. Yolaçan’s second project is a comparative study of millennial and messianic movements. It explores how embodied authority, eschatological beliefs, and textual traditions interact to create invisible forms of sovereignty.

He is also part of a collaborative project that opens a new inquiry in political anthropology by studying two ubiquitous figures of the 21st century: strongman and informal diplomat. By shifting the basis of understanding their partnership from bureaucracies to networks, law to trust, and protocols to rituals, the project renders these opaque figures legible to ethnographic and historical inquiry while offering new methodological approaches to the study of populism, authoritarianism, diplomacy, and internationalism.

Kabir Tambar is a sociocultural anthropologist, working at the intersections of politics, language, and religion. He is broadly interested in the politics of history, performances of public criticism, and varieties of Islamic practice in Turkey.

Tambar’s first book is a study of the politics of pluralism in contemporary Turkey, focusing on the ways that Alevi religious history is staged for public display. More generally, the book investigates how secular states govern religious differences through practices of cultural and aesthetic regulation. Tambar is currently working on a new project that examines the historical imagination in contexts of political closure, both at the end of the Ottoman empire and during periods of emergency rule in the era of the nation-state.

I am a political scientist specializing in elections, voting behavior, public opinion, and Turkish politics. I have led and participated in major cross-national and national projects such as the Turkish Election Study (TES), Turkish Giving Behaviour Study, International Social Survey Program (ISSP), and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). I took part in the planning committees for Modules 5 and 6 in CSES and ISSP modules on family and changing gender roles (2012, 2022), religion (2018), and social networks (2017). I am the founding PI in TES and developed the campaign media content data program, which documents daily campaign content for over ten national newspapers since 2002. My work can be accessed here.

My current research is an exploration of the secularization process in Turkey, a topic where the evidence has so far been mixed. Some scholars find the Turkish experience to possess reflections of secularization, as expected following classical modernization theory, while others present evidence that contradicts these expectations. The most recent contributions to this literature now focus on outliers where resistance to secularization exists, and one even finds a resurgence of religiosity in various dimensions of social life. I focus on Turkey, which can be considered an outlier. In the past, I have contributed to this literature through several projects and articles and touched upon the enduring influence of religion in political life.

My main argument in this project is that Turkish society's dual character, where a potentially secularizing group faces an increasingly resacralizing group, is responsible for the contrasting findings about secularization and creating the Turkish outlier. I follow historical and quantitative research, bringing together comprehensive data that focus on the country's critical areas of social development. I argue that underlying Turkish ideological and affective polarization is the dual character of Turkish society with opposing secularization trends.

Meredith L. Weiss joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as 2024-2025 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia for the 2024 fall quarter. She is Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). In several books—most recently, The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020), and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022)—numerous articles, and over a dozen edited or co-edited volumes, she addresses issues of social mobilization, civil society, and collective identity; electoral politics and parties; and governance, regime change, and institutional reform in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore. She has conducted years of fieldwork in those two countries, along with shorter periods in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Timor-Leste, and has held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. Weiss is the founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) and co-edits the Cambridge Elements series, Politics & Society in Southeast Asia. As a Lee Kong Chian NUS–Stanford fellow, she will be working primarily on a book manuscript on Malaysian sociopolitical development.

Major: International Relations
Hometown: Redwood City, California 
Thesis Advisor: Abbas Milani

Tentative Thesis Title: From Kashf-e-Hijab to the Islamic Republic: Veiling, Unveiling, and State Power in Iran

Future aspirations post-Stanford: I participated in the Stanford in Washington program last fall and loved exploring the city, working in government, and learning from incredible mentors. I'd love to go back to D.C. after graduation and work at the intersection of foreign policy and women's rights.

A fun fact about yourself: I have been a competitive opera singer for twelve years!