Dr Başak Ertür

Overview

Biography

Başak Ertür is a Senior Lecturer in Law and co-director of the Centre for Law & the Humanities at Birkbeck School of Law. She is currently also a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

She is the editor of Manual for Conspiracy (2011) and co-editor of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (2008), as well as Something Is Rotten in the State, a special issue of Theory & Event. Recent articles have appeared in Critical Times, Law & Critique, Theory & Event and in the edited collections Vulnerability in Resistance and Law, Memory, Violence: Uncovering the Counter-Archive. Her first monograph Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials is forthcoming.

Başak has translated work by Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Val Plumwood into Turkish. She is also the co-director and co-producer of the documentary film, For the Record: The World Tribunal on Iraq (2007).

Qualifications

• PhD, Law, University of London, 2015
• MA, Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research, 2006
• BA, Combined Honours in Arts, Durham University, 2002

Administrative responsibilities

• Director of Postgraduate Research

Visiting posts

• Research Fellow, Forensic Architecture, 12-2017

Honours and awards

• Julien Mezey Dissertation Award, Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, August 2016

ORCID

0000-0002-5216-4547

Research

Research interests

• law, history, memory
• political trials
• state violence
• theories of performativity
• law and the humanities
• academic freedom

Research overview

I am currently completing a monograph entitled Spectacles and Spectres: A Performative Theory of Political Trials. For this work, I have engaged closely with theories of performativity as a way to understand the workings of law as a discipline. The research for this book has also involved investigating the entanglements of law and political violence; the relationship between law; memory and history; the concept of haunting as a way to understand temporalities of violence; and the interstices between legal performatives and legal performance.

I have published articles and book chapters on a range of topics including filmic representations of transgendered bodies before the law; countermonumental practices of resistance; conceptualizing and studying state violence; conspiracy theories and the law; academic freedom in the War on Terror; genocide denialism and memory laws; and the concept of conscription in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (see under publications for bibliographic details).

Some of the themes I keep returning to are epistemologies and aesthetics of law; state violence; memory; and resistance. 

Research Centres and Institutes

• Co-director, Centre for Law and the Humanities
• Research Fellow, Forensic Architecture

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

5

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of research interest.

Current doctoral researchers

• ANNA RAHEL FISCHER

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020 onwards

• ELENI PAPAKONSTANTINOU

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2019 onwards

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• PHILIPP KENDER

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Jul 2018

  Title of thesis:

  Authoritarian Government in Early Twenty-First Century Europe: Elements of a Genealogy

  Awarded:

  2022

• CEYLAN YILDIZ

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Jan 2016

  Title of thesis:

  ‘The Murderer State Will Be Held to Account’: The myth of the state and its violence

  Awarded:

  2021

• TARA MULQUEEN

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Mar 2018

  Title of thesis:

  Constituting the Co-operative: Law and the Political in the History of the English Co-operative Movement

  Awarded:

  2019

Teaching

Teaching modules

• The History and Philosophy of Human Rights (LADD005S7)
• Advanced Crime and Law (LALA104H5)
• Political Violence and Terrorism (LALA110H6)
• MPhil/PhD Research Methods (LALA228Z7)

Publications