Kerem Öktem

Research Fellow, European Studies Centre, University of Oxford

Kerem Oktem is Research Fellow at the European Studies Centre, St Antony’s College and teaches the Politics of the Middle East at the Oriental Institute. He read Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford, where he also completed his D. Phil. thesis at the School of Geography in 2006. In the thesis, he explored the destruction of imperial space in the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent construction of an exclusively Turkish national territory. His research interests range from the history of nationalism, ethno-politics and minority rights in Turkey to debates on history, memory and trauma, and to Turkey’s conflicted relations with Armenia and Greece. More recently, he has started a research project on the emergence of Islam as a central d iscursive category in European public debates.