Research Interests:  Race and Ethnicity, Empires, Colonialism, Nationalism, Historical Sociology

Baris Unlu completed his PhD in Sociology at SUNY Binghamton in 2008. In 2017, with a State of Emergency decree, he ­­was expelled from Ankara University, where he was working as Assistant Professor, for signing the Academics for Peace declaration. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Virginia, he was a Philipp Schwartz research fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

His most recent book, The Turkishness Contract, published originally in Turkish in 2018, will appear in English in 2024 (under contract with Temple University Press). Drawing upon the conceptual tools and theoretical perspectives offered by Black radical thought and Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies, the book presents a historical-sociological model to examine not only the historical constitution and contemporary functioning of the Turkish nation-state, but also the cognitive, affective and bodily modes and habits of being Turkish.