Banu Gökarıksel Appointed Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies
August 2, 2021
UNC Global Affairs
Banu Gökarıksel
Banu Gökarıksel, professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been appointed to a four-year term as chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies.
Gökarıksel holds an impressive record of leadership and scholarship at Carolina. A faculty member since 2005, she recently completed a three-year term as the Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The Graduate School. In addition to her role as a core faculty member with the Department of Geography, she has a joint appointment in the Curriculum in Global Studies, teaching geography and multidisciplinary courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. Her research interests lie in religion as well as feminist political and cultural geographies. Gökarıksel also has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University.
Among her other roles, Gökarıksel served as co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies from 2014 to 2018. Additionally, she was awarded Carolina’s 2017 Chapman Family University Teaching Award and the 2018 American Association of Geographers Enhancing Diversity Award. She also co-directed the Duke in Istanbul summer program in 2012 and 2013 and the Duke Middle East in Europe summer program (based in Berlin) in 2018 and 2019.
Gökarıksel is the co-editor of Feminist Geography Unbound (West Virginia University Press, 2021). She is currently working on a book called The Neighbor Paradox: Living with Difference in Turkey. She recently co-organized Unsettling Borders, a Fall 2020 conference.
Gökarıksel succeeds Arne Kalleberg, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology, who held the position from 2019-2021. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Kalleberg’s tenure resulted in many successes, including several seminars that brought together global studies faculty and other faculty from across campus to discuss ways of adding more global content to courses and ways of decolonizing global studies and dismantling racism.
While Gökarıksel is on research leave in Fall 2021, Jonathan Weiler, the curriculum’s associate chair and director of undergraduate studies, will serve as interim chair.