Nur Yalman is a social anthropologist at Harvard University, where he serves as senior Research Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies.
Yalman received his high school diploma from Robert College, Istanbul. For his BA and PhD, he studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University under the mentorship of Edmund Leach and carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka. At Cambridge, Yalman was a Bye-Fellow of Peterhouse, and subsequently joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Chicago. During his stay at Chicago, he served as Director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1968-1972. He then joined the Harvard University faculty in 1972. Yalman is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Although his first book, Under the Bo Tree, was on Sri Lankan kinship and marriage, he has since expanded his research to include religion and politics in Middle Eastern and Muslim cultures. He has also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sri Lanka, India, Iran and Turkey. Yalman’s varied research interests are expressed in the wide number of languages he speaks: Turkish, English, French, German, some Persian, Sinhalese, Italian and Arabic. He teaches courses on structuralist and post-structuralist theory and on issues of modernization and social change.