Research Interests: Affect/Emotion Studies; Critical Phenomenology and Embodiment; Feminist Theory; Gender, Labor, and Globalization; Urban Ethnography; Precarity and Vulnerability.

Esra Sarıoğlu is a scholar of gender and globalization. Her work explores the ways in which emotions, bodies, and embodiment blend with markets, institutions, and systems as broad as global capitalism and sexism in the Global South. Her first book, The Body Unburdened: Violence, Emotions, and the New Woman in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2022) examines political forces and historical processes through a feminist lens, revealing an ensemble of emotional and embodied processes that invigorate Turkey’s neoliberal urban economy, women’s sociality and activism, as well as authoritarian politics. The book won the American Sociological Association's Body and Embodiment Section Best Book Award (2023).

Sarıoğlu’s work has appeared in Gender, Work & Organization, Women's Studies International Forum, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Kadin/Woman 2000, L'Homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft. She has also published several book chapters and essays in Turkish and English.

Sarıoğlu received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Binghamton University. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Virginia, she was a research scholar at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin and an Assistant Professor in Gender Studies Division at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Ankara University, Ankara.