Alp Yenen

Alp Yenen is a senior assistant lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Basel. He studied History and Culture of the Middle East (Turkish, Ottoman, and Iranian Studies), Political Science, and Economic Geography at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Basel. His dissertation was entitled “The Young Turk Aftermath: Making Sense of Transnational Contentious Politics at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1918–1922.”

Some of his early findings regarding the connection and disconnection between conspiracy theories and conspiratorial politics can be found in his book chapter “The ‘Young Turk Zeitgeist’ in the Middle Eastern Uprisings in the Aftermath of World War I.” War and Collapse: World War I and the Ottoman State, edited by M. Hakan Yavuz and Feroz Ahmad, University of Utah Press, 2016, pp. 1181–16.

His general research interest lies in the comparative politics and connected history of the modern Middle East, as well as its trans-regional and global entanglements. He uses cultural approaches to the history of contentious politics and integrates conspiracy theories (as well as press news, intelligence analysis, public rumors, and interpersonal gossips) as narrative modes of sense-making in complex political processes and conflicts.

« back to all members