Karen Barkey is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She also is the director of the Center for Democracy, Toleration and Religion (CDTR), located at Matrix Social Science.
Barkey has written and edited several award-winning books that were translated into Greek and Turkish. Her first book, Bandits and Bureaucrats, was awarded the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award in Social Science History, and her second book, Empire of Difference (Cambridge UP, 2008), was awarded the 2009 Barrington Moore Award from the American Sociology Association and the 2009 J. David Greenstone Book Prize from the Political Science Association. She also edited After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (with Mark Von Hagen). Another edited book, Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (with Elazar Barkan), explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine/Israel, three regions that were all once under Ottoman rule. For more on her work, visit http://karenbarkey.com.
Barkey is one of the curators of the traveling exhibition Shared Sacred Sites. She worked on the iterations of the exhibition shown in the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Photography, and the Yeni Cami in Thessaloniki (2017) and the New York exhibition at The New York Public Library, Morgan Library and Museum, and Graduate Center, CUNY (2018). She also runs a website on this topic that brings together international participants and expertise on many shared sites around the world, also entitled Shared Sacred Sites. She started this project to promote awareness and understanding of the coexistence of religions. Visit sharedsacredsites.net for more information.
