Esra Tunc

Office: AL-672 | Email: [email protected]

Esra Tunc is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at San Diego State University. As a scholar of religion and capital, her work interrogates “Islamic” and “ethical” financial technologies, while exploring socialities based on care and solidarity.  

Her first book project, “Technically Relational: Islam and Capitalism in the United States,” examines the innovation of finance and philanthropy among U.S. Muslim communities. The book also explores Muslim grassroots economic projects that ground their work in relational ethics. Bringing religion and capital into conversation with epistemologies of relationality, her project aims to contribute to not only scholarly work at the intersection of religion, economy, and technology but also the search to imagine and implement alternative communal and cosmological relationalities amidst widely criticized products and systems within and beyond Muslim communities. 

She is also at work on her second book project, a cultural history and ethnography of multispecies relations in Muslim traditions, with a focus on seed, soil, and water. 

Her research has been supported by grants and awards from the Social Science Research Council and Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, among others. 

Dr. Tunc is on the steering committees of the program units on Religion and Economy and Contemporary Islam at the American Academy of Religion. She is also on the editorial board of Religious Studies Review and on the board of Feminist Studies in Religion (electronic branch).

Prior to joining the faculty at SDSU, she held a postdoctoral appointment at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2022 and her M.A. from New York University in 2017, both in religious studies.