Nazan Üstündağ received her PhD in 2005 from the sociology department at Indiana University Bloomington. Between 2005 and 2018 she worked as an Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of Sociology. Between 2018 and 2020 she was affiliated with the Transregionale Studien in Berlin as an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund fellow. Between 2020 and 2023 she received a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation Patrimonies program. Currently, she teaches at Alice Solomon Hochschule in Berlin and broadcasts in Jin TV on worldwide news on women. Nazan Üstündağ’s work concerns feminist political theory, political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities, and state violence in Kurdistan. Her most recent book, Mother, Politician and Guerilla: Political Imagination in the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement, was published in 2023 by Fordham Press. Üstündağ worked as a columnist in the journal Nokta and the newspaper Özgür Gündem and her opinion pieces appeared in venues such as Bianet, T24, Roar Magazine, and Jadaliyya. She is a founding member of Women for Peace and Academics for Peace in Turkey. She is also a member of the Global Prison Abolitionist Network and Women Weaving the Future. She is co-editor of the Turkey Page.
