Korkmaz, dr. A. (Ayşenur)

Ayşenur Korkmaz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Meertens Institute. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests span critical heritage studies, mass violence, and genealogy. Korkmaz is part of the ERC-funded MakeBelief project (Principal Investigator: Dr. Ernst van den Hemel), where her ethnographic work focuses on immersive heritage spaces—such as miniature theme parks and reenactment sites—associated with neo-Ottomanism and their role in shaping affective political imaginaries in Turkey. The central research questions driving her subproject project include: What kinds of affective experiences arise from the heritagization of the Turkish-Ottoman past? How do immersive affective landscapes help shape subjectivities and new political imaginaries? These affectscapes are part of a top-down process designed to build, sustain, and regulate imaginaries anchored to Islamic values, Turkish nationalism, and Ottoman nostalgia. Yet, they also function as material actants, capable of breaking free from the meanings imposed by their heritage makers. In doing so, they may generate unexpected intensities and discourses.

Key publications

• “‘Our Sacred Native Land’: Armenian Roots Tourism in Eastern Turkey,” Imagining Homelands in Modern Turkey, special issue of Études arméniennes contemporaines 14 (2021): 49–78, https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2410 
• “At ‘Home’ Away from ‘Home’: The ex-Ottoman Armenian Refugees and the Limits of Belonging in Soviet Armenia,” Journal of Migration History 6 (2020): 129–50, https://doi.org/10.1163/23519924-00601008  
• “The Hamidian Massacres: Gendered Violence, Biopolitics and National Honor,” in Collective Violence, Exclusion, and Construction of (National) Identity in Turkey, (ed.) Raymond Kévorkian & Stephan Astourian, 81–122, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).