Prof. YASİN AKTAY

Biography

Yasin Aktay was born in Siirt in 1966. After he graduated from Siirt Religious Vocational High School in 1985, he received his bachelor’s degree from the Sociology Department at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1990, where he also obtained his master’s degree in 1993 and PhD in 1997. His master’s thesis was entitled Political and Intellectual Disputes on the Academisation of Religious Knowledge and PhD dissertation was entitled Body, Text, Identity, Islamist Discourse of Authenticity. He became associate professor of applied sociology in 1999 and professor of sociology of institutions-associations in 2005.  He continued his research and delivered lectures at the University of Maine at Farmington and the University of Utah in USA. He was an academic member of the Sociology Department at the Selcuk University between 1992 and 2012. He is still an academic member of the Sociology Department at the Yildirim Beyazit University. He started to publish the journal Tezkire in 1991 and Sivil Toplum Dergisi in 2002. He was also the chairman of the Strategic Thinking Institute in Ankara between 2010 and 2014. Aktay, who made TV programs in different TV channels, published articles and books in English, Turkish and Arabic in Turkey and abroad. Besides his membership at the Turkish Academy of Sciences, he still has opinion columns in the newspaper Yeni Safak and aljazeera.net.