Begüm Adalet

Assistant Professor

Overview

Begüm Adalet is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. She is a political theorist with research and teaching interests in infrastructures and ideologies of empire, anti-colonialism, and transnationalism, with a focus on the Cold War period. Her writings have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and South Atlantic Quarterly, among others. They are currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled, Insurgent Mood: Black Radical Internationalism from the United States to the Middle East. Before coming to Cornell, they were Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University and Instructor in the Politics Department at Ithaca College. 

Publications

Selected Publications

2024 “Empire and Radical International Thought,” co-edited with Alina Sajed, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11235551

2024   “An Insurgent Mood: Politics of Home in Lorraine Hansberry’s Writings,” American Political Science Review https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000157

2024   “An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective” American Political Science Review https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542400025X

2023 “W. E. B. Du Bois and transnationalism: a conversation” International Politics. Roundtable Discussion on Inés Valdez’s Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, (with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Adam Dahl, Katrin Flikschuh, Inés Valdez) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00436-w

2022 “Erupting Out of the ‘Zone of Non-Being’: The Cunning of Solidarity.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 30(1): 79-81. Symposium on Geo Maher’s Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (with responses from Henry Aoki, Kevin Bruyneel, Geo Maher, Althea Sircar, Anna Terwiel) https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2022.1010

2022 "Infrastructures of Decolonization: Frantz Fanon and Scales of Worldmaking” Political Theory https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211009152

2022 “Agricultural Infrastructures: Race, Land, and Statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221124139

2020 “Mediating the Kennedy Presidency: James Baldwin’s Decade in Turkey,” Globalizing the U.S. Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy, ed. Cyrus Schayegh, Bloomsbury Series “New Approaches to International History,” 2020 http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350134690.0025

2020 “James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere” (Review of Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again) Public Bookshttps://www.publicbooks.org/james-baldwin-here-and-elsewhere/

2018 “Tensions, terrors, tenderness: James Baldwin’s Politics of Comparison,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38 (3) http://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-7208834

2018 Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey, Stanford University Press  https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28678

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