Zeynep Türkyilmaz received her BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University in Istanbul and her PhD from the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009 and 2010. She worked as an Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College between 2011 and 2016 and as a program coordinator and research fellow at Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. Her research and teaching interests include state formation, gender, nationalism, colonialism, religion, and migration in the Middle East from 1800 to the present. Between 2021 and 2025, she was a research fellow of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms and Global History at Universität Potsdam. Since 2025, she has been an associated Research Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.