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. 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. 

As a scholar of religion and capitalism, her work interrogates “Islamic” and “ethical” financial technologies, while exploring socialities based on care and solidarity.  Her current book project, “Relational Economies: Islam and Capitalism in the United States,” examines the innovation of philanthropy and financial capitalism among Muslim communities in the United States. 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. Her research has been supported by grants and awards from the Social Science Research Council and Lake Institute on Faith and Giving, among others.