About me

As Director of faculty development, I support, celebrate, and advocate for our faculty community at UMass Amherst. I provide leadership in the creation, implementation, and evaluation of faculty development programs, including new faculty onboarding and orientation, faculty mentoring, and workshops to enhance the success of all faculty.  I also collaborate in strategic planning to facilitate faculty professional growth and support faculty fellows in the Office of Faculty Development.

I bring to this role a deep understanding of diversity and extensive experience with evidence-based programming for equity and inclusion in higher education, particularly in research contexts. I am an American-born Turkish woman of mixed descent (Turkish and Irish-American) and a cultural anthropologist whose work examines women, labor, and the global economy. My current role builds upon my past work:

  • as Associate Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences at UMass Amherst, I supported interdisciplinary, innovative and impactful collaboration between faculty and research to advance social justice. From 2018-2022, I worked to grow the Institute from its infancy of 75 affiliates to over 1000 affiliates and helped to raise funds so that our budget increased from $50K to $500K.
  • as Managing Director for the NSF-funded national Center for Autonomous Chemistry, based at UMass Amherst, I assisted the Director in developing and implementing the Center’s strategic plan. I also designed, implemented, and evaluated the Center’s national outreach and “broader impacts” outreach programs.
  • as Research Development Coordinator at the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research and Engagement, I coordinated a grant program to assess the possibility of a Center for Racial Justice and Urban Affairs at UMass Amherst and managed UMass Amherst’s membership in the Worldwide Universities Network.

My dedication to advancing equity through research and engaging the public in scholarly findings stems from my professional identity as a cultural anthropologist and an educator who has had success in communicating my own research to multiple audiences.  My research and teaching has spanned many topics – from Islamist veiling and undocumented migration in Turkey to trafficking in women in Eastern Europe. Yet, an underlying theme is the intersectional analysis of controversial debates regarding women’s status, role, and representation. My book, Worker-Mothers at the Margins of Europe: Gender and Migrations between Moldova and Istanbul (Indiana University and Woodrow Wilson Press, 2015) explores the world of undocumented migrant women on the margins of Europe – detailing an unusual pattern of migration from Moldova to Turkey and the transformations from socialism to capitalism. In it, I show how changes in the global economy have affected women in this region, but also how ideas about gender shape the way we think about migration and the global economy. I made a concerted effort to engage public debates on migration in my book. Thus, I was particularly honored when, as part of their Public Education Initiative on Migration, “World on the Move, ” the American Anthropological Association invited me to give a public book talk at Busboys & Poets in Washington DC.

I hold a BA in International Relations (George Washington University, 1994), MA in Social Science (University of Chicago, 1997), and PhD in Anthropology (University of Massachusetts – Amherst 2008). Parallel to my studies, I worked outside of academia in a variety of capacities (as Writer and Editor for Encyclopaedia Africana, Development Associate at a refugee resettlement agency in Boston, Consultant to the International Organization for Migration, and as a Research Assistant, Editor, and Conference Organizer). In 2007 – 8, I was a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute in Washington DC and in 2008 -9 I held a postdoctoral research scholarship at Sabanci University in Istanbul. I have taught most recently at Mount Holyoke College and UMass Amherst.