Employed at the VLJI until 2020

Duygu is a historian; her research focuses on minorities in Turkey. She has a PhD (2019) from the Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral dissertation concerns the Jewish minority in Turkey and Israel’s influence in shaping its identity (1948–2002). Her MA is also from Tel Aviv University; her thesis focused on the formation of Kurdish national identity between 2009 and 2014. In 2016 she received the Dan David Prize for young scholars. She is now creating documentary films about the Jews of Thrace and the Kurds in Europe and she is promoting Onlyherstory, a project she launched on Instagram, documenting the life stories of women in Turkey. Duygu started working at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in the middle of 2017 and since then has been the associate editor of the Journal of Levantine Studies.