Speaker

Soli Özel holds a BA in Economics from Benningon College and an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins-SAIS. He currently teaches at Koç University in Istanbul. Özel was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna in 2024-2025. He has been a columnist in Nokta magazine, Yeni Binyıl, Sabah and Habertürk newspapers and his writings were published in various academic journals and newspapers around the world. He held fellowships at Oxford, the EU Institute of Strategic Studies, Northwestern University and at the Belfer Center of the JFK School at Harvard University. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, SAIS, University of Washington, Northwestern University, Hebrew University, Sciences Po-PSIA, AUCA and Yale. In Turkey he taught at Bilgi University, Kadir Has University and Boğaziçi University. He held a Richard von Weizsacker fellowship at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin between 2015-2017. Currently he is a senior fellow at Institut Montaigne. He co-authored a book with Michael T. Rock, Elite Origins of Development and Democracy. Currently he is working on another book with Michael T. Rock tentatively entitled Elite Origins of Democracy and Development in the USA. He is a member of the ECFR.