Leyla Neyzi

Leyla Neyzi (born 29 July 1961) is a Turkish academic, anthropologist, and oral historian. She is particularly interested in the study of conflict-afflicted areas. Neyzi is employed at the Sabancı University in Istanbul, and in 2025 she is the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow. Neyzi was born in Istanbul, Turkey, the daughter of Ali H. Neyzi, a businessman and writer, and Olcay Neyzi, a pediatrician. After graduating from Robert College of Istanbul, she studied Anthropology at Stanford University (BA 1982) and Development Sociology at Cornell University (PhD 1991). Her doctorate was titled 'Beyond “Tradition” and “Resistance”: Kinship and Economic Development in Mediterranean Turkey,’ and won the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award. She worked as an assistant professor at Boğaziçi University (1992–1994) and as the Oral History Project Director for the Economic and Social History Foundation (1995–1996). She currently teaches Anthropology at Sabancı University. As of 2025, Neyzi is the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, lecturing in memory studies and oral history. She has also been a visiting scholar at St Antony's College at the University of Oxford, where she taught in the South East European Studies course. Neyzi is particularly interested in the study of conflict-afflicted areas. She produced a notable series of studies based on the diaries of Yaşar Paker, who came from the small Jewish community of early 20th-century Ankara and was twice enrolled in labor battalions in Turkey, first during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and second during the Second World War. One of these studies was published in Jewish Social Studies in Fall 2005. Neyzi publishes in both English and Turkish.