Hale Yılmaz

Hale Yılmaz is an Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She received her M.A. (Political Science) and Ph.D. (History) at the University of Utah (1998, 2006) after completing her B.A. in International Relations at Marmara University, İstanbul. She taught at the University of Montana before moving to SIU. She teaches a wide range of courses in Turkish and Middle Eastern history, Islamic history, women’s history, and nationalism. Her research interests center on questions of nationalism and nation-building, secularism and modernity, social and cultural change, everyday forms of resistance, politics of dress, and politics of language in Turkey and the Middle East. Dr. Yılmaz is the author of Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923-1945 (Syracuse University Press, 2013). Becoming Turkish (Her book) was recently published in Turkish by İstanbul Bilgi University Press as Türk Olmak: Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi’nde Milliyetçi Reformlar ve Kültürel Tartışmalar. Her other publications include editing the memoirs of a Turkish bureaucrat, Kemal Tanyolaç, (Kıyıköy’den SEKA’ya) and a special dossier for JOTSA (Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies) on small-town Anatolian fairs known as panayırs. Her current research projects focus on various aspects of Turkish social history including the panayırs, changes in gender relations, and the memories of the 1930 Menemen incident.