Prof. Ayhan Kaya is political scientist at the Department of International Relations and the Director of the European Institute. He is a Professor of Politics and Jean and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at the Department of International Relations, İstanbul Bilgi University and a member of the Science Academy, Turkey. He received his PhD and MA degrees at the University of Warwick, England. He is the principal investigator for the ERC project titled “Nativism, Islamophobism and Islamism in the Age of Populism: Culturalisation and Religionisation of what is Social, Economic and Political in Europe”. Kaya was previously a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy and adjunct lecturer at the New York University, Florence in 2016-2017. He previously worked and taught at the European University Viadrina as Aziz Nesin Chair in 2013, and at Malmö University, Sweden as the Willy Brandt Chair in 2011. Some of his books are Turkish Origin Migrants and Their Descendants: Hyphenated Identities in Transnational Space (London: Palgrave, 2018); Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey (London: Palgrave, 2013); Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization (London: Palgrave, 2012).
Dr. Büke Boşnak is an assistant professor of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds an MSc in European Politics and Governance from the London School of Economics and PhD in Political Science from University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research focuses on civil society, Europeanisation, gender studies, environmental politics and human rights, and EU-Turkey relations. She previously taught at University of Birmingham, Boğaziçi University and Koç University. She is currently teaching courses on civil society, external relations of the EU, and international relations.
Dr. Inan Ruma is an assistant professor of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University, working since 2008. He received his PhD in Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, with dissertation on “The Role of the International Community in the Democratisation Process in Bosnia-Herzegovina”. He had first MA in METU IR with thesis on “Macedonia’s Post Yugoslav Path: Cycles of Crisis and Survival”. Second, MA “Gouvernement: Institutions Politiques” in University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne with thesis on “Les Effets de l’Elargissement de l’Union Européenne sur l’evolution des droits des minorités en Bulgarie”. He has worked on Balkans, International Organisations, International Political Economy and Turkish Foreign Policy. He is currently working on the political economy of foreign policy in the cases of Turkey and Russia.
Dr. Ayse Tecmen is the post-doctoral researcher at İstanbul Bilgi University’s European Institute for the ERC project titled “Nativism, Islamophobism and Islamism in the Age of Populism: Culturalisation and Religionisation of what is Social, Economic and Political in Europe” (785934). She was a researcher for the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project titled ‘Critical Heritages: Performing and representing identities in Europe’ (CoHERE, 693289). She has a PhD in Politics from the University of Bristol. She graduated from Emory University in the USA with a BA degree in Political Science and received her MA degree in European Studies with High Honours from İstanbul Bilgi University. Her fields of interest include European culture, heritage, identity, public diplomacy, nation branding.
Emre Gönen, MA completed his undergraduate and master's degrees in Sociology / Social and Cultural Anthropology at University of Strasbourg. He continued his doctoral studies at Paris Descartes University in France. In 1993 he received a post-graduate certificate from the Free University of Brussels on European Union integration. Gönen has served as the Secretary General of the Economic Development Foundation (IKV) for seven years prior joining to the Istanbul Bilgi University. He joined Istanbul Bilgi University in 2000 and worked as the director of the MA Programme in European Studies for 12 years. This graduate programme was initiated with the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and is now being carried out in cooperation with the University of Viadrina in Federal Germany. Emre Gönen has been teaching at Bilgi for 19 years on topics such as European history, EU integration, the history of diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, French political history, and European political economy. Since 2011, he has been serving as the Rector's Advisor. Since 2014, Gönen has been writing weekly columns in English in Daily Sabah. He has many interviews, critics, and published articles.