School of Social and Political Science

Background

I received my PhD in anthropology from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2019. Before coming to Edinburgh, I served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Northwestern University (2019-2021) and a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Lausanne (2021-2023). I've published in Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Political Geography. I'm currently working on a book project on the politics of oil and geology in Turkey, which will be published by Duke University Press.

I'm currently working on two new research projects: (1) coal-to-renewable energy transitions in Appalachia and the UK; and (2) emergent and everyday forms of right and left-wing environmentalisms. Both projects involve art, literature, and storytelling-based methods and as well as counter-mapping and speculative ethnographic practices.

Selected Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Oguz, Z. and Goodale, Mark. 2024. "Introduction: Contesting the moral worlds, scales, and epistemics of energy transitions." Critique of Anthropology 44(3) special issue "Contesting Transitions" (Mark Goodale and Zeynep Oguz, eds.).

Whitington, J. and Z. Oguz. 2023. “Geology, Power, and the Planetary.” Environmental Humanities 15(3) special issue “Earth as Praxis” (co-authored with Jerome Whitington)

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Of Geosocial Relations and Separations: Detangling Violence Across Scales of Extraction and Colonial Warfare.” Environmental Humanities 15(3) special issue “Earth as Praxis” (Zeynep Oguz and Jerome Whitington, eds.).

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Speculative Undergrounds: Oil’s Absent Presence, Neo-Imperialisms, and Earth Politics in Turkey.” Cultural Anthropology, 38, (3): 411-437.

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Managing Oil Theft: Socio-material relations, debt, and disruption in Southeastern Turkey.” Journal of Cultural Economy.

Oguz, Z. 2021. “Cavernous Politics: Geopower, Territory, and the Kurdish Question in Turkey.” Political Geography 85.

Peer-reviewed book chapters

Oguz, Z. 2025. “Is There Oil in Turkey?: Geology, Oil Exploration, and the Indeterminate Materiality of Resources.” In Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise. (Duygu Kasdogan, Ekin Kurtic, and Mehmet Ekinci, eds.). Bloomsbury.

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Catastrophic Formations: Political Cosmologies of the Great Flood on the Mountains of Anatolia,” in New Earth Histories. (Alison Bashford, Emily Kern, and Adam Bobbette, eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Speculative Matters: The Pasts and Presents of Oil in Turkey,” In Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil: Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold. (Nelida Fuccario and Mandana Limbert, eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Oguz, Z. 2022. “Tectonics,” In An Anthropogenic Table of Elements. (Timothy Neale, Thao Phan, and Courtney Addison, eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.