Biography
Assoc. Prof Mehmet Özay is currently a full-time lecturer and researcher at the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Thought and Civilization at the International Islamic University of Malaysia (ISTAC-IIUM). Between 2007-2010, Özay became a visiting lecturer in Education Faculty and Post-graduate studies at the Islamic State University of Ar-Raniry and taught Sociology and Anthropology at the Department of Social Sciences and Politics (SOS-POL) at Syah Kuala University (Unsyiah) and Muhammadiyah University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. He worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Education, the University Technology Malaysia (UTM), Skudai, Johor Bahru, between 2010-2013. Between postgraduate lecture works, he was awarded research grants on Colonial Education; Malay Language and Nationalism; and Traditional Islamic Education in Malay World; Aceh History and Sociology by Research Management Center at UTM. His further career endeavour was in the journalism field, leading socio-political coverage of the Malay World under Turkish national media, Anadolu Agency (AA) and Turkish Radio and Television (TRT), before joining Ibn Haldun University in İstanbul from 2017 to 2021. He has written almost a dozen of books and more than 20 book chapters and edit books written in Malay, English and Turkish languages. His expertise is highly interdisciplinary in the field of socio-politics, history, and religio-anthropological field in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, India and other Asia-Pacific regions. The academic articles as products of research activities during all these years in Indonesia and Malaysia were presented at various international conferences and published in Turkish, English languages in international journals.
