31/08/2026
Our University's Board of Trustees has decided to confer the title of Emeritus Professor upon Prof. Dr. Ayşe Kadıoğlu, a faculty member of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, effective September 1, 2026.
Professor Ayşe Kadıoğlu received a PhD in Political Science at Boston University in 1990. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. She became one of the earliest faculty members of the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. She joined the founding faculty at Sabancı University in 1998 where she served as a faculty member for 28 years. During this time, she served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences between 2013-2017; she also served as the Acting President of Sabancı University between 2016-2018. As a member of the founding faculty, she played a role in the preparation of the early curricula of almost all the undergraduate and graduate programs at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She served on the executive board of the Education Reform Initiative, the executive board of the Istanbul Policy Center, Sabancı University and Stiftung Mercator Initiative, and the advisory board of SU Gender. She collaborated with the Director of the Istanbul Policy Center in the design and implementation of the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards from 2013 onwards. As the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Acting President of Sabancı University, she played a key role in the processes that led to the foundation of the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies at Columbia University.
Professor Kadıoğlu has been a visiting scholar/fellow at Harvard University Center for European Studies, Harvard Kennedy School Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, Columbia University Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford and the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute. She has been a part of the Yale Law School’s annual Middle East Legal Studies Seminar since 2004. She was a member of the advisory board of Bucerius migration focused PhD support (Settling into Motion) by Zeit-Stiftung. She was a member of an advisory group in the Council of Europe (Group of Eminent Persons) in 2010 that published a report on freedom and diversity in 21st century Europe.
Her research interests span from migration and citizenship studies, women and migration, comparative dynamics of new authoritarian regimes to comparative nationalisms, political ideologies, the intellectual origins of nationalism and liberalism in Turkey, and Turkish secularism. Her recent work examines the role of constitutions and laws in the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, particularly focusing on the notion of autocratic legalism. Additionally, she has been researching and writing the biographies of forgotten women of Istanbul against the historical background of the city at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to authored/co-edited books, she has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals. Professor Kadıoğlu will continue to teach as the Sakıp Sabancı Visiting Professor at Columbia University during the 2026-27 academic year.
