Professional Bio

I am a sociologist who uses quantitative and computational methods to study intergroup relations, immigration, culture, and politics. My work broadly focuses on anti-immigrant attitudes, ethnic and racial identification, prejudice, religious change, and nationalism.

My recent article in Social Forces, Religious Rebound, Political Backlash, and the Youngest Cohort: Understanding Religious Change in Turkey, received the 2025 Distinguished Article Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR). It also earned the 2025 Lombra Outstanding Graduate Research Award from Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts, recognizing it as the best social science article published by a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University.

I hold an M.A. in Sociology from Penn State, where my master’s thesis on the attitudes of majority and minority group members toward immigrants received the 2024 Huber-Form Award. Before my time at Penn State, I earned an M.A. from the University of Mannheim as a DAAD–TEV scholarship holder, and I completed my B.A. in Sociology at Boğaziçi University.

Publications

Atac, Ibrahim Enes, Charles Seguin, and Brandon Gorman. Forthcoming. “Cultural Solidarity, Economic Threat: How Discrimination Influences Anti-Immigrant Attitudes.” Current Sociology.

Iceland, John, Eric Silver, and Ibrahim Enes Atac. 2026. “Moral Intuitions and Support for Immigration.” Social Science Quarterly 107(2):e70146. doi:10.1111/ssqu.70146.

Atac, Ibrahim Enes, Charles Seguin, and Brandon Gorman. 2025. “The Wages of Ethnic Power: Socioeconomic Status, Group Threat, and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes in Western Europe.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 00207152251387940. doi:10.1177/00207152251387940.

Atac, Ibrahim Enes, and Gary J. Adler Jr. 2025. “Religious Rebound, Political Backlash, and the Youngest Cohort: Understanding Religious Change in Turkey.” Social Forces 103(3):1144–66. doi:10.1093/sf/soae102.