Metehan Tekinirk is a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Colgate University who studies political culture and institutions. Dr. Tekinirk specializes in Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Sociology, with particular focus on nationalism and national identities, democratic backsliding and resilience, populism and populist incumbents, and party politics. His other interests include hegemony, neoliberalization, globalization, and counter-culture movements.

He received his PhD in 2022 from Boston University with a dissertation problematizing the populism – national identity relationship in modern Turkey, as well as his MA in 2018. He also holds BA degrees in Economics and International Relations (2015) from Koç University in Istanbul. Dr. Tekinirk is a member of the Middle East and North Africa and Comparative Politics sections of the American Political Science Association.

His book manuscript New Nationalism, New Turkey demonstrates that populist leadership and mobilization have been indispensable strategic elements of the Political Islamist movement in Turkey, and that populism can play an instrumental role in national identity contestation in divided and polarized polities, especially given pre-existing alternate identity proposals. His 2020 book chapter, “Globalization, the Rhetoric of Nationalism, and the Resilience of Neo-liberalism,” published in Elgar’s Research Handbook of Nationalism, argues that while neoconservative governments in Hungary and Turkey in the 2010s negatively characterized neoliberalism and relevant institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and credit rating agencies in order to boast nationalist and populist credentials, the political economic models and programs of these governments, in fact, reproduce critical effects of neoliberal restructuring.