CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now with Brian Van Wyck (HIST)

The Dresher Center’s CURRENTS: Humanities Work Now lunchtime series showcases exciting new work in the humanities in a dynamic and inter-disciplinary setting.

Advanced registration for lunch is required. Sign up by October 16

Brian Van Wyck, Associate Professor, History
Fall 2026 Residential Faculty Fellow

Transnational Racialization: A Case Study from Turkish-German Migration History

This talk examines the life story of a Kurdish Alevi teacher from Turkey who emigrated to West Germany and whose advocacy work shaped German policy toward Islam in the 1970s and 1980s. This intervention helped to justify importing Turkish state control of religious instruction in the diaspora and drew on a Turkish racial grammar pitting secular elites against a rural, religious population. At the same time, the Turkish government stripped him of citizenship for Kurdish "separatism." Van Wyck uses the case study to examine the paradoxes of migration and racialization which result in migrants both suffering and sometimes also enacting racialization across time and (transnational) space.

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