Dr. Gökçen B. Dinç

Dr. Gökçen B. Dinç started working at the University of Hamburg, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Department of Turcology, as a TUBITAK Postdoctoral Fellow in March 2022 with a project on Mevlid as “lived religion” in the history of the Republic of Turkey. She continued as a Gerda Henkel Fellow in 2024, working on the historiography of the leading Turkish historian Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı. In February 2025, she joined the University of Utrecht, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and continues as a Gastwissenschaftlerin/guest researcher at the University of Hamburg, AAI, Department of Turcology. Her current research examines the history of Turkey in terms of religion rather than Islam, in order to understand the roots of the normative understanding of religiosity as Sunni-Islamic. The aim is to understand the Western influence on religion and Islam in Turkey and to illuminate the history of material forms of religiosity by focusing on Hıdrellez, a religious practice that was and is celebrated in a convivial manner by people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Situated at the intersection of religious studies and history, this project will bring together a postcolonial history of superstition” with the historical analysis of “material religion”, and will advance global debates on how religion is discussed today through its critique of essentialist definitions of Muslim-majority nations. Dr. Dinç holds a PhD in History from Humboldt University in Berlin (2017) and an MA in History from Istanbul Bilgi University (2011). She is the author of two books on the history of midwifery and “folk religion” in modern Turkey, and of several articles on gender and religious history in Istanbul and modern Turkey. She has a strong interest in postcolonial and “global religious history”, as well as lived and material approaches to religion, which she developed during her postdoctoral studies.