Ipek Türeli holds the Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice at McGill University where is she is appointed as Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. She holds a Diploma from the Architectural Association and a PhD in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley. Before joining McGill University, she completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brown University and the Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT.

Türeli’s areas of research include spatial justice, urban media and visual culture. She has many publications on visualizations of the city in photography, film, exhibitions, and museums. Her research on Istanbul was awarded several fellowships and grants including that by the Graham Foundation, Mellon Foundation and MERC in the US. Her publications include the co-edited book Orienting Istanbul (2010) and authored book Istanbul Open City (2018).

Türeli has been engaged in several, collaborative public facing, research-creation projects such as the “Design for the Global Majority” project (2023) a book based on which is in the works (with McGill-Queen University Press). She is currently working on a book manuscript on early American college campuses in the Middle East, the research of which has been supported by grants from the SSHRC and FQRSC, and an article based on which came out in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (June 2024).

Türeli is Coordinator of the Research Group on Democracy, Space and Technology (RGDST) under the Lin Centre, a founding member of the Montreal Ottoman Turkish Studies Workshop (MOTS), and a member of the Montreal-based inter-university research network  Laboratoire d'étude de l'architecture potentielle (LEAP).

Türeli serves the wider campus community as elected university Senator and as MAUT Councilor. She serves the discipline through her work for the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). A former Director of the Board of the SAH, she is currently part of the editorial team of JSAH as book review editor. She is a member of the Advisory Council of IASTE and a regular reviewer for its journal TDSR.