A native of Istanbul, Turkey, Pelin Telseren Kadercan is a historian of the Modern Middle East with an interest on the histories of the relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a global context. Her research and teaching interests lie in the broad fields of displacement, war, human rights/women’s rights, political violence and insurgency, nation state formation, sectarianism in the Islamic world, education, modernism, and film.
She is currently completing her book on the German and Jewish émigrés who fled Nazi Germany for Turkey. Examining the transnational encounters in music, visual arts, and humanities education, her research explores how the cross-territorial forces in the form of ideas and a real dialogue between multiple actors conditioned the nation-building processes as a dynamic space of decision-making.
Pelin completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Rochester, NY. She has an M.A. degree in International Relations from the European Union Institute of Marmara University, and a B.A. from Bogazici (Bosphorus) University, Istanbul.
Pelin acted as a visiting professor at Brown University, and a researcher and organizer at various institutions in the UK, Spain, and Turkey. During the 2012-2013 academic year, she acted as the Executive Director for Academic Affairs at Koc University in Istanbul. Her experience as a higher education professional in Turkey enabled her to have a comprehensive understanding about a broad range of matters in politics and education in the region.
Pelin is also an affiliated research scholar in Middle East Studies at Brown University and an assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University. For the last year, she curated a series of films titled “Displacement: Us and Them Across the Borders”.
Currently, at CCSU, she is combining two of her passions in a course: “History and Documentary Film”. She has been offering “Women in Islam,” “Modern Middle East,” “World Civilizations I/II,” and "Refugees in the Middle East" courses.
© 2018 Pelin Telseren Kadercan. All rights reserved.