Deniz is a current Ph.D. student in the sociology department at Boston College. Her research contributes to the fields of race and ethnicity, global and transnational sociology, political sociology and social theory.
Her dissertation project studies the historical and contemporary antecedents regarding the movement to add a new Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) race category to the 2020 decennial census. This work is attentive to literatures in sociology, political science, and history, and attempts to scrutinize how theories of racialization are used as explanatory mechanisms for discrimination against and stratification of those of Middle Eastern descent
