Buket Oztas joined Furman’s Politics and International Affairs department as an assistant professor in the Fall of 2017. Her expertise is in Comparative Politics, with a regional focus on the Middle East. Her research interests fall broadly in the fields of political Islam and regime transitions in the Islamic world, but she also does research on European Politics, particularly on the changing institutional dynamics of the European Union.

Originally from Izmir, Turkey, Dr. Oztas received her B.A. and B.S. degrees (2010) from Bilkent University (Turkey) and Binghamton University (New York), and her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida (2016). Before coming to Furman University, she served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Government at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and offered courses on Comparative Politics, Politics of the Middle East and Islam in European Politics.

Her most recent work focuses on the interplay between political Islam and democratization. The book project she is currently working on, based on her dissertation and extensive fieldwork in Turkey and Tunisia, examines the party system religiosity and the quality of democracy in 36 Muslim-majority countries and gives a detailed account of how Islamist parties hindered, or contributed to, democratic processes in countries as distinct as Albania, Tunisia, Turkey and Indonesia. ​​​​

SYLLABI

POL-102 Introduction to World Politics
POL-225 Politics of the Middle East