Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison

Perin E. Gürel is Associate Professor of American Studies and Concurrent Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (2017) and her articles have appeared in leading journals, including American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Diplomatic History. Gürel is the winner of the 2020 Jack Rosenbalm Prize for American Humor Studies and has held fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute of Turkish Studies, and elsewhere. Her debut fantasy novel, Laleh and the Language of the Birds, a feminist retelling of a classic Sufi legend, is forthcoming in 2026.

• Introduction; 1. Daddy issues: Reza Shah, Atatürk, and comparison as personification; 2. A modern empress: modernization theory and the politics of beauty; 3. Aspirational whiteness and honorary blackness: race, religion, and the politics of defiance; 4. Veiled agents: Islamic feminism, similitude, and the limits of solidarity; 5. America's coy lovers: claiming mysticism and dialogue from the Cold War to the War on Terror; Epilogue: the forbidden lovers: beyond the triangulation?.

'For much of the past century, Iran and Türkiye have occupied an intertwined space in the US global imaginary-a geopolitical love triangle that has had quite real effects on all three nations. Perin Gürel follows the comparisons through their many permutations during the Cold War through the War on Terror, bringing together diplomatic history, popular culture and public discourse in three national frameworks. This is a crucial book for understanding a key region.' Brian T. Edwards, Author of After the American Century: The Ends of US Culture in the Middle East