Esra Özyürek is Professor in European Anthropology and Chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies, an anthropologist who seeks to understand the tension between politics and religion in Turkey and in Europe.She received her BA in Sociology and Political Science at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining the LSE she taught at the Anthropology Department of University of California, San Diego. She is currently working on a project about Muslim background Germans who look for ways to adopt the memory of the Holocaust as proof of their commitment to liberal democracy and empathic humanity.