Osman Balkan Wins 2024 Charles Taylor Book Award

Osman Balkan has won the 2024 Charles Taylor Book Award for his book Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which was published as part of the LSE International Studies Series.
 
Conferred by the American Political Science Association, the Charles Taylor Book Award commemorates the eminent political philosopher’s contributions to interpretive thought in the political and social sciences. The award is conferred annually on a book exploring an aspect of political life that addresses problems and topics in interpretive methodologies or reports the results of empirical research using interpretive methods.
 
Balkan is Associate Director and Program Director of Curriculum, Experiential Learning, and Innovation at the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies.
 
Dying Abroad draws on multi-sited fieldwork conducted by Balkan in Berlin and Istanbul, where he worked as an undertaker. The book offers an ethnographic account of migrants’ end-of-life dilemmas, illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and identity in contemporary Europe.
 
Balkan’s research and teaching focus on the politics of global migration, race and ethnicity, identity and inequality, political violence, and collective memory, with a transregional concentration on Western Europe and the Middle East. His writing has appeared in journals including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Journal of Intercultural Studies, and Review of Middle East Studies, in edited volumes such as Muslims in the U.K. and Europe and The Democratic Arts of Mourning, and in public-facing outlets such as Project on Middle East Political Science. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service.
 
Prior to his current appointment at Penn, Balkan held faculty positions at Cornell University and Swarthmore College and served as resident director of the U.S. State Department’s Critical Languages Scholarship Program in Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey.