School of Social and Political Science

Background

I received my PhD in anthropology from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2019. Before coming to Edinburgh, I served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Northwestern University (2019-2021) and a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Lausanne (2021-2023). I've published in Cultural Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Cultural Economy, and Political Geography. I'm currently working on a book project on the politics of oil and geology in Turkey, which will be published by Duke University Press.

Selected Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Whitington, J. and Z. Oguz. 2023. “Geology, Power, and the Planetary,” Environmental Humanities 15(3) special issue “Earth as Praxis” (co-authored with Jerome Whitington)

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Of Geosocial Relations and Separations: Detangling Violence Across Scales of Extraction and Colonial Warfare.” Environmental Humanities 15(3) special issue “Earth as Praxis”

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Speculative Undergrounds: Oil’s Absent Presence, Neo-Imperialisms, and Earth Politics in Turkey.” Cultural Anthropology, 38, (3): 411-437.

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Managing Oil Theft: Socio-material relations, debt, and disruption in Southeastern Turkey.” Journal of Cultural Economy.

Oguz, Z. 2021. “Cavernous Politics: Geopower, Territory, and the Kurdish Question in Turkey.” Political Geography 85.

Peer-reviewed book chapters

Oguz, Z. forthcoming. “Is There Oil in Turkey?: Geology, Oil Exploration, and the Indeterminate Materiality of Resources.” In Material Politics: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise in Modern Turkey. (Duygu Kasdogan, Ekin Kurtic, and Mehmet Ekinci, eds.). Bloomsbury.

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Catastrophic Formations: Political Cosmologies of the Great Flood on the Mountains of Anatolia,” in New Earth Histories. (Alison Bashford, Emily Kern, and Adam Bobbette, eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oguz, Z. 2023. “Speculative Matters: The Pasts and Presents of Oil in Turkey,” In Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil: Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold. (Nelida Fuccario and Mandana Limbert, eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Oguz, Z. 2022. “Tectonics,” In An Anthropogenic Table of Elements. (Timothy Neale, Thao Phan, and Courtney Addison, eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.