Pembroke Center

Kate Elizabeth Creasey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. She is an intellectual and cultural historian of the Modern Middle East who specializes in contemporary Turkey.  Her dissertation project provisionally titled "The Unspeakable Years: Military Rule, Neoliberalism, and Left Resistance in Cold War Turkey" studies anti-left counterinsurgency and the instantiation of neoliberalism in the aftermath of the 1980 coup d'état in Turkey.  In her work Kate pays particular attention to how people from social democratic and left movements that flourished in the 1970s before the coup d'état worked to preserve- often at great risk- the the imaginaries of different possible futures in the face of violent state repression. In so doing Kate connects this period in the history of Turkey to the 1979 moment in the Middle East and larger histories of the late Cold War in the Global South. Kate's project is informed by the extensive amount of time she spent living, studying, and writing in Istanbul, Turkey between 2007 and 2013. Before starting at Brown in 2018, Kate worked in documentary film production in Montréal, Canada. Her writings on Turkey, pedagogy, and global labour history have appeared in Review of Middle East Studies, International Labour and Working-Class History, and Bülent Journal.