Perin Gürel

Associate Professor of American Studies
American Studies

Research Interests

Culture and Foreign Policy, U.S. and the Middle East, Gender and Race in Popular Culture

Biography

Perin Gurel is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching explore the United States in the world and the world in the United States through transnational feminist lenses, with special focus on U.S.-Middle East relations and Islam in the United States after World War I.  

Gurel earned her Ph.D. in American Studies and a graduate qualification in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University in 2010. Her first book, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press in 2017), explores how gendered stock figures and tropes associated with the concept of “westernization” in Turkey have intersected with U.S.-Turkish relations in the twentieth century. Her second book project, tentatively titled America's Wife, America's Concubine: Turkey, Iran, and the Bounds of Middle Eastern Solidarity, analyzes cultural production in Turkish, Persian, and English to examine how American media and discourses have impacted Turkish representations of Iran and Iranian representations of Turkey from the Cold War to the War on Terror.

Professor Gurel has held fellowships and grants from the Institute of Turkish Studies, the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, Dickinson College, and Yale University. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Journal of Turkish Literature, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Advisory Network for the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. She is also Faculty Fellow for the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame.

She teaches a variety of courses at Notre Dame, including “Transnational America,” “Gender and Popular Culture,” “Humor and Power,” “Islam and America,” and “American Conspiracies.