Osman Balkan is Associate Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business. His research and teaching focuses on the politics of global migration, race and ethnicity, identity and inequality, Islam and Muslims in the West, and necropolitics.
His first book, Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023), examines how minoritized communities navigate end-of-life decisions in countries where they face structural barriers to full citizenship. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Berlin and Istanbul, Dying Abroad illustrates how the seemingly quotidian practices surrounding the death, burial, and repatriation of racial and religious minorities are structured by deeper political questions about the meaning of citizenship, home, and belonging in an increasingly transnational world.
Balkan's work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Project on Middle East Political Science, Theory & Event, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Contemporary French Civilization. He has published book chapters in edited volumes such as Turkey's Necropolitical Laboratory: Democracy, Violence, and Resistance, Muslims in the UK and Europe, and The Democratic Arts of Mourning: Political Theory and Loss.
Balkan is co-founder of the American Political Science Association's Political Ethnography Working Group and serves on the Executive Council of APSA's Migration & Citizenship Section. Between 2017 - 2019, he was a lead faculty participant in Swarthmore College's Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary Program, a partnership with the City of Philadelphia and recently resettled Syrian and Iraqi nationals that explored art's capacity to create empathy and belonging. In the summer of 2021, Balkan co-lead an APSA early career workshop on "Visuality and the Creation of Liminal Spaces of Participation: Ethnographic Approaches to the Middle East and North Africa," working with Ph.D. students from across the MENA region.
Prior to Penn, Balkan held faculty positions at Cornell University and Swarthmore College. He also served as Resident Director of the U.S. State Department's Critical Languages Scholarship Program in Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey. For more information, please consult his personal website at: http://www.osmanbalkan.com
2016-- Ph.D., Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
2012-- M.A., Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
2005-- B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa), Political Science, Reed College