This is an in-person event with a virtual option. To join the Zoom Webinar, please register here. 

On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul – where the author worked as an undertaker – Dying Abroad offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.

About the speaker:

Dr. Osman Balkan is Associate Director and Program Director of Curriculum, Experiential Learning, and Innovation at the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies.

Balkan’s research and teaching focus on the politics of global migration, race and ethnicity, identity and inequality, political violence, and collective memory with a transregional concentration on Western Europe and the Middle East. He is the author of Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which was published as part of the LSE International Studies Series. 

Balkan is co-founder of the American Political Science Association’s “Political Ethnography Working Group,” and serves as an elected member of the Executive Council of APSA’s “Migration & Citizenship” Section. Prior to his current appointment at Penn, he held faculty positions at Cornell University and Swarthmore College and served as Resident Director of the U.S. State Department’s Critical Languages Scholarship Program in Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Inter-University Committee on International Migration
For more information or accessibility accommodations please contact svanmell@mit.edu.

The Inter-University Committee on International Migration
Since its establishment in 1974, the Inter-University Committee on International Migration has been a focal point for migration and refugee studies at member institutions, which include Boston University, Brandeis University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Harvard University, MIT, Tufts University, and Wellesley College. The committee is chaired by MIT as a program of the Center for International Studies (CIS).

Migration Seminar Series
During each academic year, the Committee sponsors a seminar series on international migration, The Myron Weiner Seminar Series on International Migration, held at MIT's Center for International Studies. The seminars explore factors affecting international population movements and their impact upon sending and receiving countries and relations among them.

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