Widely recognized as the wife of jailed Turkish-French businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala, revered political economy professor and social scientist Ayşe Buğra teaches at the Ataturk Institute of Modern Turkish History of Bogazici University in Istanbul .

She completed her Ph.D. in economics at McGill University and is the co-founder and director of the research center Social Policy Forum at the same university.

Her research interests include comparative social policy and gender relations, international development, and business history. Her last book is entitled New Capitalism in Turkey: The Relationship between Politics, Religion, and Business (co-authored with Osman Savaşkan, Edward Elgar publishing 2014).

Her other books in English include State and Business in Modern Turkey (State University of New York Press 1994), State, Market and Organizational Form (co-edited with Behlül Üsdiken, Walter de Gruyter 1997), Reading Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century: Market Economy as a Political Project (co-edited with Kaan Ağartan, Palgrave MacMillan 2007), and Trajectories of Female Employment in the Mediterranean (co-edited with Yalçın Özkan, Palgrave MacMillan 2013).

Her articles in the area of social policy in general and female employment patterns, in particular, have been published in such journals as Social Politics, European Journal of Social Policy, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Development and Change, Middle East Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and New Perspectives on Turkey.

Ayşe Buğra is the translator of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation into Turkish.