Kerem Öktem

Kerem Öktem is a professor for the studies of Southeast Europe and Turkey at the University of Graz, Austria.

Öktem’s research project for his Mercator-IPC Fellowship is titled “The Emergence of a Muslim Patron State: Freedom and Diversity in German-Turkish Relations.”

Öktem’s main interests lie in the connection between domestic politics and foreign policy, nationalism, and the politics of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and social movements in Turkey. He was a research fellow at the University of Oxford. He is an expert in Middle Eastern Studies, Turkish Politics, and International Relations. In terms of regional perspective, he seeks to frame Turkey’s politics and recent history within the context of its overlapping neighborhoods: the Middle East, Southeast Europe, the European Union, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In terms of methodological approaches, he mostly works with qualitative research tools and ethnographic fieldwork methods.

He completed his PhD at the School of Geography at the University of Oxford in 2006, with a thesis on nation building in Turkey as a socio-spatial project (Geographies of Nationalism). Preceding his doctoral studies, he obtained a MSt in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the Faculty for Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 2001. Before his residence in Oxford, he studied and worked in Germany in the field of urban studies. He was appointed as 2013/14 Mercator-IPC Fellow at IPC.