Serap Ruken Sengul currently serves as Distinguished Research Fellow through the Promise Institute for Human Rights and the Center for Near Eastern Studies. She is an anthropologist whose work focuses on gender and sexual formations of sovereignty, nationalism, kinship, violence, memory and displacement in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. During her two-year fellowship at UCLA, she has introduced several innovative and interdisciplinary courses to upper level undergraduate offerings in the Departments of Anthropology and Gender Studies, including “Gender and Militarism,” “Gender, Kinship, and the State," and "Violence and Memory in the Middle East." Dr. Sengul earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.