Erzen Oncel

Erzen Oncel is a PhD candidate in the department of Political Science at Boston University. She received her BA degrees in History and International Relations & Political Science from Bogazici University, Istanbul. Her major field of study is Comparative Politics with a special interest in political elite, descriptive representation, and ethnic politics in the Middle East. From September 2008 to May 2010, she was the head research assistant and project manager for NSF funded “Colonialism and Its Legacies: A Historical Dataset Project” (co-PIs James Mahoney and John Gerring). Since Fall 2009, she has been managing “The Global Leadership Project” project, funded by Clinton Global Initiative at Boston University. Meanwhile, she is working on her dissertation project which examines the political, structural, and cultural factors underpinning the descriptive representation of ethnic groups among political elites across every sizeable country in the world. As a case study, she studies change in ethnic (particularly Kurdish) representation in Turkey since 1920.