Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown

Eda Tarak is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown University. Her research and teaching bring together environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, and feminist economic anthropology with a focus on experimental ethnographic methods. Her current book project, titled “The Sea is Not Empty: Maritime Trade Ecologies in the Eastern Mediterranean,” centers on the intersection of abrupt environmental shifts and coastal industrial development routed through the travels of cargo ships and the materiality of political-economy in Turkey and in the Eastern Mediterranean. This book will search for ways to attend to land and sea, blockages, flows, and overflows that signal the movement of waste and toxicity in the mixes of soil, sediment, and water. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2024 and an M.A. in Sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul in 2017. During 2024–25 she held the Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Fellow position in the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University