Professor Umut Korkut

Head of EU Funded Projects
Wise Centre for Economic Justice
Umut Korkut is Professor of International Politics at Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University.

I completed my DPhil (magna cum laude) at Central European University in Budapest in 2004. In 2009, I was awarded Associate Professorship by the Turkish Higher Education Council. I have been a visiting fellow of the Slavic-Eurasian Research Centre at Hokkaido University. I have served Political Studies Association (PSA) as Trustee and International Projects Lead. In 2018, I was elected to the executive committee of International Political Science Association. I serve ethics, and gender and diversity sub-committees at IPSA. I am a member of the WISE Institute for Social Justice management team.

I am interested in how political discourse, aesthetics and visual imagery create audiences. I follow this theoretical interest across various empirical fields central to European politics such as political regime change, gender and politics, populism and migration research. I have established expertise in Hungarian and Turkish politics. In 2017, I published a book entitled “Politics and Gender Identity in Turkey: Centralised Islam for Socio-Economic Control” following the Foucauldian approach to study the construction of gender discourse in Turkish mosque sermons.

Following my theoretical and empirical research interests, I am leading three Horizon 2020 and Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund funded projects at the moment. I am the lead coordinator for the AMIF-funded research project VOLPOWER: Volunteer and Empower: Enhancing Community Building and Social Integration through Dialogue and Collaboration amongst Young Europeans and Third Country Nationals (12.2018-12.2020). I also serve as the Principal Investigator for two Horizon 2020 funded projects named RESPOND: Multi-level Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond (12.2017-12.2020) and DEMOS: Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe (12.2018-12.2021) responsible for research on Hungary, Turkey and United Kingdom. In 2016-2018, I was a co-investigator for an AHRC funded “The Aesthetics of Protest: Visual Culture and Communication in Turkey” project.

Currently, I am supervising 5 PhD dissertations as the Director of Studies on migration management, international relations and democratisation, sports and social integration, and productivity themes.