Emine Rezzan Karaman, a doctoral student in UCLA's history department, has been awarded two prestigious women's studies prizes for a research paper on Istanbul's "Saturday Monthers."

UCLA International Institute, December 4, 2015 — Emine Rezzan Karaman, a doctoral candidate in history at UCLA, has won two prizes for her recent paper, "Performativity and Text: Motherhood as a Transforming Political Identity in Turkey.” The paper explores the phenomenon of Istanbul's “Saturday Mothers,” who in the tradition of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, have been holding weekly demonstrations since the mid-1990s to shame the Turkish government into accounting for their disappeared children during Turkey's dirty war of the 1980s and 1990s.

Karaman was been awarded both the Graduate Student Paper Prize of The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, as well as the Sati Atakul Award for Gender Studies Articles conferred by the Women’s Studies Center of Ankara University in Turkey.

Founded in 2004 by the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies, The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies is the leading publication for scholars working on topics of gender and sexuality across the Middle East and North Africa. The Women’s Studies Center of Ankara University, which has offered M.A. and Ph.D. programs since 1996, seeks to prevent the violation of women’s human rights and to promote gender equality through research, training and policy development and implementation.

Karaman is currently conducting dissertation research on the formation of gender roles in Kurdistan during the late Ottoman Empire with support from a Doris Quinn Foundation Fellowship.

Published: Friday, December 4, 2015