Deputy Director, Center for Science and Society | Ankara, Turkey

Dr. Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, in addition to being deputy director of the Center for Science and Society, also is a lecturer in the graduate program in Architectural History at Middle East Technical University, Ankara.  She received her doctorate in archaeology from Boston University and her bachelor and master degrees  in archaeology and art history from Bilkent University, Ankara. She worked as a teaching fellow at Harvard University, Boston University, and Koç University, Istanbul. She is a member of the American Research Institute in Turkey. Her research interests include religious freedoms, cultural heritage management of multi-layered sacred sites and re-utilization and museumification of religious buildings.

Dr. Tanyeri-Erdemir has directed and participated in numerous international interdisciplinary research projects.  She was the director of the Turkish teams of “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Sacred Sites” (funded by U.S. National Science Foundation and Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research) and “RELIGARE:  Religious Diversity and Secular Models in Europe, Innovative Approaches to Law and Policy” (funded by European Commission Seventh Framework Programme ). 

Her recent publications include “The Byzantine Mosque at Trilye:  A Processual Analysis of Dominance, Sharing, Transformation and Tolerance” (History and Anthropology 2011); “Religion and Discrimination in the Workplace in Turkey:  Old and New Issues and Contemporary Challenges” (International Journal for Discrimination and the Law, 2013); “Differential, Disguised and Deterritorialized:  The State Funding of Religion in Turkey” (State Financing of Religion, Ashgate, forthcoming) “Historical Trajectories, Institutional Particularities:  The Funding Regime for Religious Heritage in Turkey”  (Funding Religious Heritage, Ashgate, forthcoming); “The Iconostasis of the Republican Mosque: Transformed Religious Sites as Artifacts of Intersecting Religioscapes” (International Journal of Middle East Studies, forthcoming). 

Dr. Tanyeri-Erdemir occasionally contributes op-eds to the Hürriyet Daily News on religious freedoms, discrimination, and cultural heritage issues.