Alexander Balistreri has served as junior professor of Turkish Studies at the University of Hamburg since 2025. He studied political science and Near Eastern studies in Wisconsin, İstanbul, and Princeton, earning his doctorate from Princeton University in 2021. Prior to starting in Hamburg, he taught at universities in Basel, Freiburg i.B., İstanbul, and Zürich.

Balistreri’s expertise in research and teaching covers the politics, society, and modern history of Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Near East. His makes extensive use of Turkish, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish sources, collected from archives in Ankara, Baku, Bern, London, Tbilisi, Yerevan, and elsewhere.

He is currently dividing his research time between two main projects. The first project is an examination of state-society relations in the Anatolian-Caucasian borderland (Kars). In this sweeping political and social history, Balistreri analyzes the development of (and resistance to) territorialization and infrastructural power under three states: the Ottoman and Russian Empires and the Turkish Republic.

Keywords: borders and borderlands, empires, nation-states, land, politics of notables

The second project is a reexamination of authoritarianism in Turkey, focusing on the 1930s and 1940s. Ostensibly a state governed by clearly defined ideological parameters, the Republic of Turkey nevertheless featured integral political debates, institutional experimentation, compromise, and backtracking. Balistreri’s project probes these gaps between propaganda and practice.

Keywords: Kemalism, authoritarianism, ideology, corporatism, neutrality

Balistreri’s work has garnered multiple awards, including Princeton University’s Bayard and Cleveland Dodge Memorial Prize for Best Dissertation in Near Eastern Studies (2022) and Brill’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Early-Career Paper Prize (2015). He has been granted several long-term fellowships for research and writing in Turkey, the South Caucasus, and the United States.