Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry in the 21st c. She is also the director of Coffee Futures (Neyse Halim Ciksin Falim, DER, 2009), an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune-telling. She has also researched photography and citizenship in both the late Ottoman empire and 19th century France. Her current projects investigate the emergence of the global surveillance regimes policing mobility and nationality and the critical role of photography in this history. Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographic Journeys Across Borders (Stanford University Press, 2026) explores Ottoman Armenian expatriation portraits, one of the earliest examples of the use of surveillance photography for border control.

She also writes children's books.