Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is a historian of the modern Middle East and an affiliate of the Women and Gender Studies Program as well as the Center for International Studies.  She specializes on Turkish and Armenian lands in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Her work focuses on minority-majority relationships and the ways in which gendered analytical lenses help us better understand coexistence and conflict, including genocide and post-genocide. She is also interested in the history of non-Western feminisms, including Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Jewish, and Greek women’s movements. She teaches courses on cultural pluralism, women and war, global revolutions, and women and gender in the Middle East and North Africa. Prof. Ekmekçioğlu is the winner of the 2016 Levitan Teaching Award in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) which recognizes SHASS teachers "who make a profound difference in the educational experience of MIT undergraduate and graduate students."

Her first book, which came out in 2006, was a co-edited volume in Turkish titled Bir Adalet Feryadı, Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar (1862-1933) [A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862-1933)] . Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Beloning in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out of Stanford University Press in early 2016. The book offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey.

Dr. Ekmekcioglu is currently collaborating with Dr. Melissa Bilal (visiting scholar at MIT History) in compiling a critical anthology of the history of Western Armenian feminism. Titled “Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology” this book focuses on twelve Istanbul-born feminists who were active in various parts of the world from 1860s to 1960s. The project also has a digital humanities component, a documentary website that archives these feminists’ published and unpublished work over the years. Dr. Ekmekcioglu is also collaborating with Dr. Kent Schull (Binghamton, SUNY) for an edited volume on the entangled histories of Armenians in the 19^th century Ottoman Empire.

Once a semester Prof. Ekmekçioğlu organizes the McMillan-Stewart Lecture on Women in the Developing World.