Leyla Neyzi


Leyla Neyzi is a Turkish academic anthropologist and oral historian. She is particularly interested in the study of conflict-afflicted areas. She is employed at the Sabancı University, Istanbul, but in 2025 is the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.

Biography

Leyla Neyzi was born in Istanbul, Turkey, the daughter of Ali H. Neyzi, a businessman and writer, and Olcay Neyzi, a pediatrician. After graduating from Robert College of Istanbul, she studied Anthropology at Stanford University and Development Sociology at Cornell University. Her doctorate was titled Beyond “Tradition” and “Resistance”: Kinship and Economic Development in Mediterranean Turkey, and won the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award. She worked as an assistant professor at Boğaziçi University, and as the Oral History Project Director, Economic and Social History Foundation. She currently teaches Anthropology at Sabancı University. As of 2025 Neyzi is the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow, where she lectures in memory studies and oral history. She has also been a visiting scholar at St Antony's College at the University of Oxford, where she taught in the South East European Studies course.
Neyzi is particularly interested in the study of conflict-afflicted areas. Neyzi produced a notable series of studies based on the diaries of Yaşar Paker, who issued from the tiny Jewish community of early 20th century Ankara, and who was twice enrolled in the labor battalions in Turkey, the first time during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the second time during the Second World War. One of these studies was published in Jewish Social Studies in Fall 2005. Neyzi publishes in English and Turkish.

Awards