Dr. Sylvia Wing Önder has been teaching Turkish Language and Culture at Georgetown since the Fall Semester of 1998, when she created Georgetown’s first Intensive Beginning Turkish class (6 credits per semester) and developed Intermediate and Advanced levels for growing numbers of students. Along with language classes, she has taught a range of classes in Turkish Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Central Asian Cultures, and seminars for the School of Foreign Service’s Culture and Politics major. She has been offering a course in Medical Anthropology since 2009. Other courses include: “Europe and Islam: Orientalist Fantasies and Turkish Realities” “Anthropology and Islam” “Anthropology of Youth Cultures” “Cultures and Identities” (a collaborative course with Gallaudet University exploring Deaf Culture), and, starting in the Spring of 2015 “Disability and Culture”. Dr. Önder’s research is primarily ethnographic, including long term stays in a Turkish Black Sea village to study women’s lives and traditional healing practices. Her current research interests include political cartoons, popular music videos, and political and artistic expressions of Turkish youth groups in Turkey and in Germany, and social constructions of disability. Dr. Önder is a member of the Disability Studies Working Group, a CSJ Faculty Fellow for Global Youth Activism, a member of the Medical Humanities Working Group, and has been a Faculty Fellow with the CNDLS ITEL, Doyle, and Engelhard programs. She currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Önder is the Coordinator of Small Program Languages in the Georgetown College, and, as such, assists the dedicated faculty in Catalan, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, Polish, Swahili, Turkish, and Ukrainian. She has served in the past as Co-Director for the State Department’s CAORC Turkish Critical Language Scholarship program. She currently is Project Director for the U.S. Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad ARIT Summer Fellowships Program for Intensive Advanced Turkish at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Sylvia Önder and Heidi Hamilton Received Faculty Awards at the Georgetown College’s 2021 Tropaia and Faculty of Languages and Linguistics Awards Ceremonies
May 22nd, 2021
On May 22, 2021, Sylvia Önder was awarded the Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence at the Georgetown College’s Tropaia 2021 Ceremony, and Heidi Hamilton received the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics Distinguished Service Award at the 2021 Faculty of Languages and Linguistics Awards Ceremony.…
The Hoya Covers How Students and Professors Are Pushing for Better Accessibility for Invisible Disabilities
October 25th, 2019
The Hoya explores the barriers that exist for students with invisible disabilities in Georgetown, presenting insights from students from the Georgetown Disability Alliance and professors from the Disability Studies Program, including Sylvia Önder, on how to address them.…
The Hoya Writes about the Georgetown Disability Alliance and the Work to Address the Needs of Members of the Community with Diverse Abilities
September 19th, 2019
On its covering of the of the development of the Georgetown Disability Alliance, the student organization founded to draw attention to issues affecting students with disabilities on campus, The Hoya talked with Sylvia Önder about the work that Georgetown and the Disabilities Studies Program to bring more awareness and address the needs of members of the Georgetown community living with disabilities.…
Ottoman History Podcast: Health and Home in a Turkish Village with Sylvia Wing Önder
November 16th, 2015
Sylvia Önder talks with Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz about her monograph “We Have No Microbes Here”, looking at continuities in the centrality of households and women in making decisions about medical care within a Black Sea village.…
