Biography
Dr. Jenny B. White has authored numerous books and articles on Turkey and lectures internationally on topics ranging from political Islam and civil society to ethnic identity and gender issues. Dr. White has just published a book on contemporary Turkish nationalism and Islam (Muslim Nationalists and the New Turks [2012, Princeton University press]). She has been following events in Turkey since the mid-1970s. All of her books have been translated into Turkish.
Dr. White is the former president of the Turkish Studies Association and of the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section, and sits on the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies. She has received numerous grants and fellowships from, among others, the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays. She is author of Muslim Nationalists and the New Turks (2012, Princeton University Press), Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (University of Washington Press, 2002, winner of the 2003 Douglass Prize for best book in Europeanist anthropology) and Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (second edition, London: Routledge, 2004). All of her books have been translated into Turkish.
Dr. White was professor of anthropology for many years at Boston University and is now Professor at Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies.
She also has written three historical novels set in nineteenth-century Istanbul, The Sultan’s Seal (2006), The Abyssinian Proof (2008), and The Winter Thief . The Sultan’s Seal, translated into fifteen languages, was named one of the top ten first novels of 2006 by Booklist and was shortlisted for the 2006 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award.
Prof. Jenny White holds a PhD from University of Texas at Austin.