21 Facts About Timur Kuran

Timur Kuran is a Turkish-American economist and political scientist currently serving as a professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University.

The family moved to Istanbul in 1969, when the senior Timur Kuran joined the faculty of Robert College, whose higher education side became Bogazici University in 1971.

Timur Kuran obtained his secondary education in Istanbul, graduating from Robert College in 1973.

Timur Kuran obtained his doctorate at Stanford University, under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow.

Timur Kuran taught at University of Southern California between 1982 and 2007, where he held the King Faisal professorship in Islamic Thought and Culture from 1993 onwards.

Timur Kuran moved to Duke University in 2007, as Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies and with a joint appointment in the departments of Economics and Political Science.

Timur Kuran's visiting positions include: Institute for Advanced Study, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago;, Economics Department, Stanford University, Law School, Yale University.

From 2008 to 2014 Timur Kuran served on the executive committee of the International Economic Association.

Timur Kuran is a founding member of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies, which he has directed since its establishment in 2011.

Timur Kuran was the founding editor of the University of Michigan Press book series Economics, Cognition, and Society.

Timur Kuran has co-edited the Journal of Comparative Economics since 2017.

Timur Kuran is a promoter of freedom of expression, within and outside academia.

Timur Kuran coined the term preference falsification in a 1987 article to describe the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures.

Timur Kuran has used his theory to shed light on the persistence of East European communism despite its inefficiencies, why India's caste system has remained a powerful institution for millennia, transformations of American race relations, the aggravation of ethnic conflicts through a self-reinforcing process whereby ethnic symbols gain salience and practical significance, the eruption of mass hysteria over minor risks, and American polarization.

Timur Kuran's focus has been on the roles of Islamic law in shaping economic opportunities.

None of these institutions were disadvantageous at their emergence, suggests Timur Kuran; they solved identifiable problems.

Timur Kuran argues that the doctrine of Islamic economics is incoherent and largely irrelevant to present challenges.

Timur Kuran observes that modern zakat systems shuffle resources within the middle class or redistribute from poor to rich.

Timur Kuran has written on the Islamic controversy over the permissibility of interest; the origins, historical functions, and modern variants of zakat; and Islamic credit cards.

Timur Kuran proposes that three Islamic institutions played critical roles.

Timur Kuran has co-authored, with Mehmet Akan, volume 1 of an intended bilingual trilogy on the microhistory of the Turkish postal system.