Gizem Bilgin Aytac is an assistant professor at Istanbul University’s Faculty of Economics, Department of Political Science, and International Relations. She graduated from Istanbul University’s Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration in 2004. In 2007, she finished her MA in International Relations at Marmara University with her thesis “Social and Political Changes in 1970’s Turkey and Their Reflections on Turkish Foreign Policy”. She studied at Bologna University, Italy, as a visiting scholar in 2012 for seven months with the Turkish government’s Higher Education Council scholarship. During her thesis, she conducted field research in Iraq. She earned her Ph.D. degree at Istanbul University in 2013 with a dissertation titled “Third World Security and Humanitarian Intervention,” which has been published in Turkish. She is a volunteer specialist for the Women in Foreign Policy Initiative. Her research interests include security studies, humanitarian intervention, and gender in global politics. She presented her research at various international conferences and published articles in academic journals. She is now focusing on feminist IR literature, the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (WPS), and human security issues. As a scholar working on the WPS agenda, she contributed to several training programmes via international projects. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Security Theories, Introduction to International Relations, Current Global Issues, Global Politics and Women, and International Security. She supervises MA and PhD theses on women and security studies and final projects for undergraduates.
