Prof. Dr. Hande Birkalan-Gedik
birkalan-gedik(at)em.uni-frankfurt.de
Institution: Goethe University Frankfurt
Hande Birkalan-Gedik has been professor of Folklore, Anthropology, and Gender Studies since 2010. Currently, she is a research Fellow and the PI of the DFG-Project Folklore Knowledge and Knowledge Transfer: Folklore Milieus, Formats, and Venues in Turkey (1950s–1980s) at Goethe University Frankfurt.
A native of Istanbul, Hande Birkalan-Gedik graduated from Bosphorus University in Istanbul. Later, she studied at Indiana University-Bloomington and earned her Ph.D. at the Folklore Institute, with a specialization in cultural anthropology and gender studies in 1999. She holds a dual MA from the Department of Central Eurasian Studies/Turkish Studies Program and the Folklore Institute from Indiana University.
After her studies in the US, Hande Birkalan-Gedik returned to Turkey, and taught at the Anthropology Department at Yeditepe University-Istanbul, where she served as a faculty member in anthropology and a founding member of the graduate studies there. She was a member of the UNESCO Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Turkey (2014-2016).
She held visiting professorships at Indiana University-Bloomington (2001-2002) and at Cornelia Goethe Zentrum (Frankfurt am Main, 2014-2015) with her project on masculinity and fatherhood among men from Turkey. In 2016, she was appointed as the Aigner Roller Professor for Gender Studies at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz and taught courses at the Institut für Religionswissenschaft. She was a Fellow at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität-Seminar für Volkskunde/Europäische Ethnologie (Münster, 2018), and held a visiting position at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Jagiellonian University (Krakow, 2019).
Her research focuses on Alevis in transnational space, transnational disciplinary histories of folklore and anthropology, biographies of entangled scholars and emigree scholars, and women ethnologists and folklorists. She was the PI of DFG-Project Traveling Theories: The History of Anthropology in Turkey (1850-1950) at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie.
As a seasoned fieldworker with an interested everyday lives, her field “locations” are multi-sited and deals with the Islamic cultures in migratory contexts in Turkey and Germany. She has conducted research with Kurdish-Alevi female migrants in Istanbul, Alevi female minstrels in southeastern Turkey, and Alevi women, looking at their transnational leadership in Alevi organizations in Germany. In 2020 and 2022, she established working groups on Islam and Alevism at the European Academy of Religion (EUARE). Narrative, place, and gender, emotions and affect (with a focus on women’s expressive culture and feminist ethnography) form another strand of her research. She has worked at several archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and the USA.
In the past few years, she has developed an interest in digitally mediated cultural artifacts and digital narration as well as in the Anthropocene-and more-than-human-worlds, a field, which she connects to folktales in particular and narrative in general.
Election statement:
With the second term ahead, I am very keen on increasing SIEF's visibility among our sister networks such as EASA and the American Folklore Society. I am glad to have initiated the SIEF Series in Ethnology and Folklore: New Directions in the Study of Everyday Life, Past and Present, which we established in 2024. We have the first few manuscripts already lined up and we will be pleased to receive further submissions. Drawing on the expertise of an international editorial board, we are keen to consolidate the Series as a reputable and high-profile publication outlet, connecting SIEF’s ethnological and folkloristic voices with a diverse international audience through Berghahn, a leading international publisher of high-quality, top-tier scholarship our fields.”
Website:
https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/108867068/Prof__Dr__Hande_Birkalan_Gedik / https://www.siefhome.org/about/historian.shtml / https://www.siefhome.org/publications/SIEF_Series/series1.shtml
SIEF Directory: https://www.siefhome.org/members/sief/25034
