Dr. Çiçek Ilengiz

Çiçek İlengiz was a post-doctoral researcher in the “Empires of Memory” Research Group from 2019 until 2022. Her academic interests lied at the intersection of the history of state violence, politics of memory, politics of emotions, secularism, and space-making practices. Çiçek received her first M.A. in the Cultural Studies program at Sabancı University (Istanbul, 2013), where she worked on the dispossession and transformation of a Levantine mention in Büyükada/İstanbul into a cultural center. She received her second M.A. degree at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, where she worked on competing memory regimes around the first madman statue of Turkey (inaugurated in 1996) in Dersim/Tunceli. She received her doctoral degree from the Research Center for History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2019). Her doctoral research analyzes how holy-madness has been politicized, remembered, memorialized, and ritualized in a heavily militarized, racialized, and secularized landscape of Dersim.