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.

Alize Arıcan, CUNY-City College'da yardımcı doçent olarak çalışan bir antropologdur. Kentsel dönüşüm, göç, ırkçılık, ve ihtimam üzerine yazar, araştırma yapar, ve ders verir.

Pınar Aykaç is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. She holds an MSc in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage from METU and a PhD from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her research focuses on the relationship between heritage sites and museums, heritage politics and contestations, and the interpretation and presentation of heritage places. She is the author of Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula: Musealization and Urban Conservation (Lexington Books, 2022) and co-editor of Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement, and Catastrophe (I.B. Tauris, 2021), alongside Eray Çaylı and Sevcan Ercan. Currently, she serves as a co-editor of the journal Heritage & Society.

KORAY DURAK is an associate professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has been teaching courses on the history of the medieval Mediterranean region, Byzantine history, and Byzantine medicine since 2008. His main areas of research interest include Byzantine-Islamic relations, especially the economic side of it, commercial history of Byzantine Constantinople, and Byzantine pharmacology in addition to his lasting interest in the history of Byzantine studies in modern Turkey. Currently he is working on a project explores the exchange of materia medica between Byzantium and the Islamic world in the early Middle Ages.
Among his publications one can list “Healing Gifts: The Role of Diplomatic Gift Exchange in the Movement of Materia Medica between the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds,” Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean: Pharmacological Exchange across Cultures, Genres, and Languages (11th-14th c.), (Cambridge University Press, 2023), “Traffic across the Cilician Frontier: Movement of People between Byzantium and the Islamic Near East in the Early Middle Ages,” Byzantium and the Arab World, Encounter of Civilizations, eds. A. Kralides and A. Gkoutzioukostas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2013, “Commercial Constantinople,” Cambridge Companion to Constantinople, ed. S. Basset, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge in 2022, and a monograph named The Odyssey of Byzantine Studies in Turkey (Koç University Press, 2023).

Prof. Dr. Zeynep Enlil, Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi Şehir ve Bölge Planlama bölümü emekli öğretim üyesidir. Lisans derecesini Ortadoğu Teknik Üniversitesi Şehir ve Bölge Planlama bölümünden, Yüksek Lisans derecesini Cleveland Eyalet Üniversitesi Kent Çalışmaları bölümünden, Doktora derecesini ise Washington Üniversitesi Kentsel Tasarım ve Planlama bölümünden almıştır. Kent ve Planlama tarihi, kentsel gelişim politikaları, neoliberal kentleşme, kentsel dönüşüm, kültürel ve yaratıcı ekonomilerin kentsel ve bölgesel kalkınmadaki rolü, kentsel koruma ve turizm konularında araştırmalar yapmakta, dersler vermektedir.

2006 İstanbul Metropoliten Alanı Stratejik Planı çalışmaları kapsamında kültür endüstrileri, kültürel miras ve turizm araştırma grubunun; İstanbul 2010 Avrupa Kültür Başkenti Ajansı tarafından desteklenen İstanbul Kültür Mirası ve Kültür Ekonomisi Envanteri Projesinin ve İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi için hazırlanan İstanbul Turizm Master Planının (2011-2013) eş-yürütücülüğünü üstlenmiştir. Enlil çeşitli uluslararası araştırma konsorsiyumlarında grup yürütücüsü olarak yer almıştır. Bunlar arasında JPI Urban Europe ve ERA-NET kapsamında TÜBİTAK tarafından desteklenen “Kentsel Yaşam Laboratuvarı Deneyimlerinde Yenilikçi Kentsel Gelişme İçin Eylem Odaklı Planlama, Regülasyon ve Yatırım İkilemleri (APRILab)” ve “Enerji Verimli Kentsel Yaşam Biçimleri için Toplumsal Veri-Döngüleri (CODALoop)” başlıklı araştırma projeleri bulunmaktadır. Zeynep Enlil'in kitapları ve bilimsel yayınlarda yer almış birçok makalesi bulunmaktadır. Kitapları arasında İstanbul’un Tarihi ve Doğal Miras Değerleri: Potansiyeller, Riskler ve Koruma Sorunları; Yaratıcı İstanbul ve İstanbul'da Kültür Turizmi için Yenilikçi Stratejiler başlıklı kitaplar bulunmaktadır.  

https://melc.washington.edu/people/selim-sirri-kuru