Overview
Begüm Adalet is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. She is a political theorist with research and teaching interests in infrastructures and ideologies of empire, racism, anti-colonialism, and transnationalism, with a focus on the Cold War period. Their writings have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and South Atlantic Quarterly, among others. She is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled, Insurgent Mood: Radical Internationalism from the United States to the Middle East. Before coming to Cornell, they were Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University and Instructor in the Politics Department at Ithaca College.
Publications
Selected Publications
2024 “Empire and Radical International Thought,” co-edited with Alina Sajed, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11235551
2024 “An Insurgent Mood: Politics of Home in Lorraine Hansberry’s Writings,” American Political Science Review https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000157
2024 “An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective” American Political Science Review https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542400025X
2023 “W. E. B. Du Bois and transnationalism: a conversation” International Politics. Roundtable Discussion on Inés Valdez’s Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, (with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Adam Dahl, Katrin Flikschuh, Inés Valdez) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00436-w
2022 “Erupting Out of the ‘Zone of Non-Being’: The Cunning of Solidarity.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 30(1): 79-81. Symposium on Geo Maher’s Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (with responses from Henry Aoki, Kevin Bruyneel, Geo Maher, Althea Sircar, Anna Terwiel) https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2022.1010
2022 "Infrastructures of Decolonization: Frantz Fanon and Scales of Worldmaking” Political Theory https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211009152
2022 “Agricultural Infrastructures: Race, Land, and Statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758221124139
2020 “Mediating the Kennedy Presidency: James Baldwin’s Decade in Turkey,” Globalizing the U.S. Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy, ed. Cyrus Schayegh, Bloomsbury Series “New Approaches to International History,” 2020 http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350134690.0025
2020 “James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere” (Review of Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again) Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/james-baldwin-here-and-elsewhere/
2018 “Tensions, terrors, tenderness: James Baldwin’s Politics of Comparison,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38 (3) http://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-7208834
2018 Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey, Stanford University Press https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28678
In the news
- Global Cornell awards support new international courses
- Einaudi awards fund global research and activities
- Center for Social Sciences awards fall ’21 grants
- Senior studies how architecture shapes community life