I am a political scientist, urbanist, and critical animal studies scholar whose research examines the medical, legal, and infrastructural domains through which human–animal relations are organized, governed, and contested. My work moves along two interrelated strands: (1) archival research on urban animals and (2) fieldwork-driven ethnographic engagement and writing on human–animal relations in cities. The first strand is devoted to animal history, animal archives, and archival methodology, including archival research, visualization, exhibition-making, and curatorial research on animal histories. Through this work, I examine how animal lives and deaths are recorded, classified, made visible, and mobilized across state and municipal archives, vernacular collections, and curatorial infrastructures—treating archives not simply as repositories of evidence, but as political and affective sites where regimes of care and violence are produced, stabilized, and contested. The second strand, situated at the intersection of critical animal studies, urban research, animal histories, and veterinary ethics, analyzes the politics of violence and care as they materialize across everyday and institutional sites: forced mobilities through urban space; infrastructural incursions, breakdowns, and practices of repair; improvised and routinized performances of protection, neglect, and hostility; the production of ruins and modes of survival; affective regimes of shared precarity alongside practices of witnessing and denial; legal architectures of rights and welfare; and technocratic, scientific, and biomedical orderings of life and death—of animals and other animalized bodies in the city.

I received my Ph.D. in Politics (2021) from The New School for Social Research, New York, where I completed my dissertation, Between Care and Violence: The Street Dogs of Istanbul, tracing the history and politics of Istanbul’s street dogs from the early twentieth century to the present. My archival research under the same rubric—Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul—was presented in exhibition form as part of Lives of Animals at SALT Beyoğlu (April–August 2025). I am currently developing this project into a book manuscript while extending its concerns through my ongoing work in animal history and archives, as well as my empirical, fieldwork-driven research on contemporary veterinary ethics, animal ethics, and animal rights politics.

My primary specialization is urban animals, with a thematic focus on infrastructure, carcerality, and mobility across marginalized landscapes shaped by poverty, informal subsistence, and durable material and affective conditions. I attend to how animality and marginality become sedimented in disturbed environments, and to how contingent, improvised encounters with animals can reconfigure lived experiences of precarity and resilience—reshaping practices of place-making, boundary-drawing, and belonging among marginalized urban residents.

In parallel, my writings on veterinary ethics examine how clinical judgment, institutional constraint, and moral distress shape decision-making in contexts such as animal shelters, municipal care, and private practice, with particular attention to the ethical and affective labor of treating, managing, and, at times, ending animal life. This work is closely tied to animal rights–driven research on the everyday governance of animal welfare, the limits and possibilities of care under duress, and the institutional arrangements through which animals become legible as patients, populations, or “problems” to be managed.

I am also the principal investigator of a Turkey National Science Foundation (TÜBİTAK) 3501 project entitled Toward Multi-Stakeholder Disaster Management: Demands, Expectations, and Proposed Solutions for Integrating the Human–Animal Bond and Veterinarians into Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Recovery Processes in Istanbul (Project ID: 761128). This project brings together my interests in disaster, infrastructure, and multispecies vulnerability by examining how the human–animal bond and veterinary expertise can be meaningfully integrated into preparedness, response, and recovery frameworks, and by mapping demands, expectations, and proposed solutions articulated across multiple stakeholder groups.

I also serve as Program Director of The Four-Legged City: Urban, Nature, Animal Studies Association, a research-driven organization working at the nexus of animal rights and urban studies. In this role, I lead project development in rescue and resilience initiatives and contribute to research and training programs shaped by experiences of mass destruction and acute disturbance. As coordinator of the international animal rescue program From Ruins to Life (Enkazdan Hayata), I work toward collective approaches to imagining, designing, and building more resilient futures grounded in the shared vulnerabilities and precarities that humans and more-than-humans inhabit.

Nurçin İleri, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatı Bölümü’nde
lisans, yine aynı üniversitenin Atatürk Enstitüsü, Yakın Dönem Türkiye Tarihi
programında yüksek lisans, Binghamton Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü’nde
doktora derecelerini tamamladı. 2016–2018 yılları arasında Boğaziçi
Üniversitesi’nde yarı-zamanlı olarak geç dönem Osmanlı İmparatorluğu
ve Modern Türkiye üzerine tarih dersleri verdi. Aynı zamanda Boğaziçi
Üniversitesi Arşiv ve Dokümantasyon Merkezi’nde yardımcı koordinatör
olarak çalıştı. Hollanda’da bulunan International Institute of Social History
(Uluslararası Sosyal Tarih Enstitüsü) ve Almanya’daki Forum Transregionale
Studien’de (Bölgelerarası Çalışmalar Forumu) misafir araştırmacı
olarak bulunan İleri, kent ve çevre tarihi, emek tarihi, bilim ve teknoloji
tarihi, kültürel miras ve arşiv alanında çalışmalarına devam etmektedir.