I am a PhD candidate in Political Theory and Comparative Politics at the University of Chicago, a residential fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and a doctoral fellow at the Pozen Center for Human Rights. My research brings together contemporary democratic theory and ethnographic methods to study non-democratic politics.
My research contributes to democratic theory by studying how communities behave in ways that contradict the presumed value of democracy. My dissertation project, titled The Appeal of Authoritarianism: A Critical Theory of Citizen-Subject Formation in Turkey, investigates how authoritarian governments appeal to citizens when standard indicators such as economic performance and political stability do not explain their popular support. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in Turkey, it argues that contemporary authoritarianism in Turkey appeals to individuals by producing subjects who refer to the authority of the regime rather than the agonistic realm of democratic politics in their political judgments. My next book-length project investigates the relationship between international philanthropy and the rise of anti-gender politics in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
My work won the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award (2023) and the William E. Connolly Award of the WPSA (2026) for the best paper in contemporary democratic thought. Additionally, I received a Davis Projects for Peace Grant (2024), and I was a visiting fellow at Koç University’s Center for Research on Globalization, Peace, and Democratic Governance in 2022-23.
I have an MA in Social Sciences (2018) and an MA in Political Science (2021), both from the University of Chicago. Before coming to Chicago, I received dual BAs in Political Science and Sociology from Boğaziçi University in Turkey.
You can find my CV here and contact me at buraktan [at] uchicago [dot] edu.
Burak Tan 