Eray is a Visiting Fellow at 杏吧论坛 European Institute. He is currently a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Hamburg with a focus on violence and security in the Anthropocene. Eray studies the spatial and visual politics of violence, especially but not exclusively in Turkey and its environs. His first monograph in English is titled (2021, Syracuse University Press). It is a spatial ethnography that discusses grassroots campaigns for transforming Turkey’s sites of political violence into memorial museums and the official responses they triggered in the early 2010s.
Eray was previously awarded the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2018-22) at the EI, in which his project explores the ways in which histories of political violence permeate the politics of ecology in Turkey. Building on decolonial scholarship on climate change and the Anthropocene, this project focuses on the expertise and aesthetics involved in responding to and anticipating catastrophe. A pilot run of this project received funding from the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme and explored a set of spatial-artistic practices, which, against the grain of the hitherto prevalent tendency of engaging with political violence through its toll on humans and their "culture," have recently set out to pursue this engagement through the more-than-human forces and scales of "nature." The project also relates closely to an edited volume that Eray has co-edited, titled (2021, Bloomsbury/I.B.Tauris), and to his Turkish-language monograph (Climate Aesthetics: Essays on Anthropocene Art and Architecture, 2020, Everest). Among the first outputs from this research project are two open-access articles (hyperlinked and ) that focus on extractivism.
Alongside conducting research, Eray taught "Imaging Violence, Imagining Europe" (EU486) and "Racial Diversity and Conflict" (EU475) at the European Institute. In 2022, he received the departmental Class Teacher award and was nominated for two further, School-wide teaching awards (Award for Inclusive Education and Award for Excellent Feedback and Communication). Eray is also a founding member of the department's Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion committee with a focus on decolonizing the curriculum and surveying inclusivity.
Before joining the 杏吧论坛, Eray worked at numerous universities in the UK, designing and teaching courses as well as carrying out his own research from 2012 onwards. These include University College London's (UCL) History of Art department and Syracuse University (London programme) where he taught on urban histories of political conflict, violence and disaster, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he co-led the first-year undergraduate module in Architectural History & Theory, the University of Hertfordshire where he led Critical & Contextual Studies teaching across all three levels of undergraduate study in Architecture and Interior Architecture. Eray holds a PhD from UCL, which he obtained in 2015.