Karen Barkey


Karen Barkey is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the and a Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley. She is also the Director of the at UC Berkeley. She was previously a Professor of Sociology and History at Columbia University. She was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies at IMéRA for 2021-2022.

Education

Karen Barkey holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College.

Personal

Barkey was born in Istanbul, Turkey.

Scientific contributions

Barkey studies state centralization/decentralization, state control and social movements against states in the context of empires.
Her research focuses primarily on the Ottoman Empire and recently on comparisons between Ottoman, Habsburg and Roman empires.
She is engaged in different projects on religion and toleration. She has written on the early centuries of Ottoman state toleration and is now exploring different ways of understanding how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule. She directs a web-based project on .
Karen Barkey was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies at IMéRA, for 2021-2022. IMéRA is the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University, and a member of the French Network of Institutes for Advanced Study.

Shared Sacred Sites

Shared Sacred Sites is a collaborative project that seeks to develop a rubric for the description, classification, analysis, and publication of work relating to spaces and locations used by multiple, disparate communities for religious purposes.
Part of the project is a traveling international , which was hosted at The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseilles, France, The Bardo National Museum in Tunis, Tunisia, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, and Yeni Cami in Thessaloniki, Greece. An exhibition catalogue, ', co-edited with Dionigi Albera, Dimitris Papadopoulos and Manoël Pénicaud was published by the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art Publications in 2018.
In March 2018, the Exhibition opened at the New York Public Library, Graduate Center, CUNY, and Morgan Library & Museum in New York, USA. An exhibition catalogue, ', co-edited with Dionigi Albera and Manöel Pénicaud, was published by CUNY Publications in 2018.

Selected bibliography