Banu Gökarıksel is Professor of Geography and the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she have been a faculty member since 2005. She grew up in Turkey and earned her B.A. (in Economics) and M.A. (in Anthropology/Sociology) at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a feminist political and cultural geographer interested in bodies, borders, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. Her research analyzes embodied and lived experiences of religion and secularism, the production of social difference, and the formation of subjects, borders, and territory.