James P. Shenton Assistant Professor of the Core Curriculum, Political Science
Member, Committee on Global Thought
Turkuler Isiksel is James P. Shenton Assistant Professor of the Core Curriculum at the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in political science from Yale University and works primarily in contemporary political theory. In her work, Isiksel focuses on the ways in which descriptive and normative categories tailored to the nation-state apply to institutions that wield political power beyond that context, such as regional organizations, international economic regimes, and transnational courts.
Professor Isiksel is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Europe’s Functional Constitution, which evaluates the extent to which constitutionalism, as a normative and empirical concept, can be adapted to supranational institutions. She addresses this question in the light of the European Union’s legal order, arguing that the economically driven process of European integration has brought into being a qualitatively distinct form of constitutional practice that cannot be understood in the light of the conventional rights-based and popular sovereigntist models of constitutionalism.
Her other research interests include the evolution of ideas about commerce and international politics in eighteenth century political thought, as well as theories of sovereignty, delegated governance, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, constitutional theory, and Turkey-E.U. relations.
Before joining the political science faculty at Columbia, Professor Isiksel held a Jean Monnet postdoctoral fellowship at the Global Governance Program at the European University Institute in Florence. She holds an undergraduate degree in Politics (MA Hons) from the University of Edinburgh.
During the 2014-2015 academic year, Isiksel served as a LAPA/Perkins Fellow at Princeton University’s Law and Public Affairs Program. In Summer 2015, she will be a visiting research fellow at the Justitia Amplificata Centre for Advanced Studies at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt-am-Main. In Fall 2015, she will serve as an Emile Noël Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice at NYU School of Law.
Website
Select Publications
- “International Institutions,” in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons et al. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
- Review of Representing Justice, Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis (Yale University Press, 2011), Contemporary Political Theory 12:4 (November 2013), electronic version.
- “Between text and context: Turkey’s tradition of authoritarian constitutionalism,” International Journal of Constitutional Law, 11:3 (July 2013), pp.702-726
- Co-editor, special issue of Global Constitutionalism 2:3 (July 2013) entitled “Changing Subjects: Rights, remedies and responsibilities of individuals under global legal pluralism”
- (with Anne Thies), “Introduction,” Global Constitutionalism 2:3 (July 2013), pp. 151-159
- “Global legal pluralism as fact and norm,” Global Constitutionalism 2:3 (July 2013), pp.160-195
- “Citizens of a new agora: Postnational citizenship and international economic institutions,” in Willem Maas (ed.), Multilevel Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
Education
- PhD, Political Science, Yale University
- MA Hons, Politics, University of Edinburgh
- BA, Politics, University of Edinburgh