T. Deniz Erkmen is a researcher and lecturer, currently working as an Assistant Professor at the International Relations Department at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. After getting her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and before returning to Istanbul, Turkey, she has worked at Boise State University, ID, USA. She was also a Mercator Fellow at Stiftung Wisseschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin between 2018-2019. Her teaching and research fields are comparative politics and political sociology, involving transnationalism, new middle classes, authoritarianism, autocratic legalism and protest repression. She has published academic articles in Territory, Politics, Governance; Sociology; Democratization; South European Politics and Society; Current Sociology and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, as well as other pieces in venues such as Democracy Now and Informed Comment.