Ph.D. Stanford University
M.A. Stanford University
M.A. New York University
Fırat Bozçalı is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political and legal anthropology, political economy, border studies, science and technology studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, with a focus on modern Turkish and Kurdish politics.
His first book, Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford University Press, 2025), examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the support of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Moving from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, the book explores how Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework legal procedures, rules, and reasoning in ways that interrupt the courts’ capacity to co-opt, discipline, and oppress.
Bozçalı’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Mellon Foundation, the Connaught Fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). His publications include articles in English and Turkish in journals such as American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Theory, Journal of Cultural Economy, Middle East Report, and Toplum ve Bilim (Turkish), as well as chapters in edited volumes such as Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory. His commentaries, book reviews, and journalistic reports have appeared in venues including Cultural Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropological Review (PoLAR), New Perspectives on Turkey, Arab Studies Journal, Birikim (Turkish), Jadaliyya, and the Kurdish Globe (based in Iraqi Kurdistan). He also translated Partha Chatterjee’s Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World into Turkish.
