Emrah Yildiz

Global Horizons Junior Fellow, SCAS

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African
Studies, Northwestern University

Photo of Emrah Yildiz

Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt

Emrah Yıldız (he/him/o) is a sociocultural anthropologist of cross-border mobility and region formation, author of Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (University of California Press, 2024), editor of kaçak | qaçax | قاچاق : Fugitive Forms of Bureaucracy and Economy across South-west Asia (Journal of Cultural Economy 17(2) 2024), and co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (JadMag 1(4) 2014). Yıldız has published research articles on saint visitation and mobility in Islam, contraband commerce and currencies under sanctions, and queer asylum, borders and territorial states in Cultural Anthropology, d i f f e r e n c e s, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Toplum ve Bilim. His short-form analyses, translations, and interviews have featured in Asoo, Bianet, Counterpunch, and Jadaliyya. Yıldız works as an assistant professor of anthropology and Middle East and North African studies at Northwestern University, where he serves on the faculty board of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program, and is a founding co-convener of the Colloquium for Global Iran Studies (CoGIS).

As a 2024–2025 Global Horizons Junior Fellow at SCAS, Yıldız will be working on his second monograph, titled Outsmarting “Smart” Sanctions: Currency, Mobility and Security between Iran and Turkey. The book chronicles the regional lives of “smart” sanctions placed on Iran, with a focus on how cross-class segments of Iranian society engage in creative experiments in sanctions mitigation and circumvention between Iran and Turkey.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.

Learn more about Emrah Yıldız's research project.