Bengisu Zeynep Ertuğrul

BIO

Zeynep Ertuğrul's research focuses on the political and social history of contemporary Turkey, particularly political intermediaries and collective violence. Her doctoral work was supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Institut français d’études anatoliennes. Zeynep holds a BA from Galatasaray University, an MA from École normale supérieure, and a joint Ph.D. from École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She has previously taught at Freie Universität Berlin, Sciences Po, and served as a research assistant at the Sorbonne.

Project Description
Her current project, Preaching the Republic, examines how popular pedagogy and state violence intersected in the making of modern Turkey. It focuses on the People’s Preachers Organization (Halk Hatipleri Teşkilatı), a partisan institution active during the republic’s formative years that recruited locally chosen secular “preachers” to disseminate the regime’s political message. Drawn from professions such as teaching, law, medicine, and the bureaucracy, these party-appointed preachers delivered lectures in cultural centers and public squares, serving as ideological emissaries of the ruling party.

This project examines the interplay among the actors, settings, and practices of early republican popular education to demonstrate how these initiatives extended beyond the goals of modernization, westernization, or secularization of the broader population. It investigates the enduring effects of prolonged warfare and mass violence during the late Ottoman period on early republican educational practices. The analysis focuses on the biographical, performative, and discursive impacts of genocide and other forms of state- sponsored mass violence on popular pedagogy.