M. Alper Yalcinkaya

M. Alper Yalçinkaya is an associate professor of sociology at Ohio Wesleyan University. As a cultural sociologist with historical interests, he has so far focused on the history of Turkish attitudes toward religion and science. In his book Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State and Society in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015), he analyzed 19th-century Turkish debates on science and religion, and in a recent article published in Zygon, he studied how the category of religion was reconstructed by Turkish intellectuals in these debates. In general, his work has focused on the role debates about science and religion play in making and remaking of the two categories, and the changing public perceptions of science and religion. Representations of science and religion in the media is another area of research for Yalçinkaya, and he has recently published a piece on how Turkish journals represented the relations between Islam and science during the Cold War. He is currently working on a project about the reception of the theory of evolution in Turkey, focusing on intellectual and public debates. With a lot of expertise in the development of the Turkish discourses on science and religion, his future work will focus on contemporary Turkey.