Dr Ayse Polat

Ayse completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and then served as a postdoctoral fellow and associate lecturer at the Universities of Columbia and Cornell in the USA. She has since taken up positions as a Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford and as an Associate Lecturer at St Edmund Hall.

Ayse works on the politics of international law, race, and migration with a regional focus on the modern Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. She has published her work on the international politics of pan-Islamism and Islamic humanitarianism, the racial politics of migration law, and the modern perversions of humanitarianism. Her ongoing projects include statelessness and the making of early international law, international politics of settler colonisation in the early 20th century, political theories of race and migration in the Ottoman-Arab intellectual tradition, and the political economy of light in 20th century Beirut.