Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, School of Arts and Sciences. Her research bridges media anthropology, visual culture, and historical studies, focusing on photography’s role in governance, migration, and news production. She holds a PhD in Anthropology (2007) from UC Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. Her work includes the book Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (2016) and the award-winning film Coffee Futures, exploring Turkish politics through coffee fortune-telling. Current projects examine Ottoman Armenian emigration photographs and late Ottoman medical imagery. She was a NOMIS Fellow (2018-2019) at eikones Center in Basel.

Education:

• B.A. (magna cum laude), Yale University, 1995
• M.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2001
• PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2007

Research Interests: Media anthropology, visual ethnography, Ottoman history, migration studies, photography’s role in statecraft, and the anthropology of imagination. Her work analyzes how visual practices shape citizenship, knowledge production, and political subjectivity across historical and transnational contexts.

Publications: Over 15 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on photojournalism, Ottoman bureaucracy, and digital media. Her scholarship appears in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Grey Room.

Awards & Fellowships:

• NOMIS Fellowship, eikones Center, 2018–2019
• Award-winning ethnographic film Coffee Futures

Labs/Teams: Affiliated with the eikones Center for Theory and History of the Image (Basel) and ongoing collaborations with the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (Istanbul).