Alev Çınar teaches politics at the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Political Science in 1998, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship program as part of the Project of Cities and Urban Knowledges at the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University in 1999. She was appointed as a Ford Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center and taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst during Fall 2001. She also taught at Bryn Mawr College during Fall 2005 as a Fulbright Visiting Specialist. Her publications include Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies Places and Time, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and “National History as a Contested Site: The Conquest of Istanbul and Islamist Negotiations of the Nation” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2001, 43:2). She is also the co-editor of Locating The City: Urban Imaginaries and the Practices of Modernity, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2006. Her research interests include the relations between politics, nation-hood and nationalism; state and nation-building practices; the public sphere; modernity, Islam and secularism in Turkey; and the ways in which public and national subjectivities are constructed in relation to gender, ethnicity, religion, class and urban space. Her work embraces interdisciplinary approaches and combines the study of politics with urban studies, gender studies, cultural studies, media and film studies. Her current project is on the study of Turkish cinema as a site from which Turkish nationalism and modernity are constructed and negotiated.