Emrah Yıldız
· Associate Professor of Anthropology and MENA StudiesNorthwestern University · Linguistics
Active 2014–2024
About
Emrah Yıldız is an associate professor of Anthropology and MENA Studies at Northwestern University. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in cross-border mobility and region formation, with research spanning political economy, religious studies, and social geography. His work focuses on ritual, saints, and mobility in Islam; sanctions, contraband commerce, and national currencies in political economy; as well as asylum, borders, and territorial states across Southwest Asia. Yıldız's first book, Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (University of California Press, 2024), synthesizes these areas of scholarship by chronicling Iranian visitors' journeys via Turkey to the Sayyida Zainab shrine in Syria. The book approaches rituals of mobility, such as saint visitation (ziyārat), as a traffic of pilgrims, goods, and ideas across Iran, Turkey, and Syria, emphasizing the social and spatial institutions involved. His ethnographic and archival research across Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and French sources informs this cross-sited, cross-lingual, and cross-scalar conception of ziyārat as a ritual of mobility. Yıldız's scholarly contributions include editing special issues and volumes, publishing articles in prominent journals, and engaging in public commentary. His research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants from institutions such as the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, DAAD, Max Planck Institute, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Currently, he is working on two research projects: one on queer asylum travels across Iran, Turkey, and Germany, and another on the regional impacts of economic sanctions and cross-border trade in 'fictitious commodities' between Iran and Turkey. At Northwestern, he has taught across anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, Middle East and North African Studies, and religious studies, and has held various fellowships and leadership roles within the university.
Awards & honors
- Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences from the Middle…
- Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology…
- Middle East Section Book Award Honorable Mention from the Mi…
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