He received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching interests include the politics of migration and citizenship, transnationalism and diasporas, Islam and Muslims in the West, race and ethnicity, biopolitics, and necropolitics. Balkan's research is situated at the intersection of comparative politics, political theory, and cultural anthropology. He employs ethnographic and qualitative methods to understand how politics is experienced and interpreted by ordinary citizens in their everyday lives. His current book manuscript examines the funerary practices and burial decisions of ethno-religious minorities in Germany. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul, it shows how the corpse functions as a political object by structuring claims about citizenship, belonging, and collective identity.