Elise Massicard is a political sociologist. Her research focuses on the political sociology of contemporary Turkey. She studies relationships between space and politics, which she inquires through parties, social movements, the sociology of institutions, state-society relations, and everyday politics. By looking and actors in the political field (rulers, activists, citizens, officers, intermediaries), she explore the autonomy of politics from other social fields. Through qualitative in-depth studies, she focus on the analysis of actors, and the way they are entrenched spatially and socially, but also the circulations - including transnational. She coordinated the collective project "Order and compromise: modalities of government and administration in Turkey and in the Ottoman Empire since the 19th century to the present day" funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (2008-2012). She is a member of the collective research project “The manufacture of electoral truth. National Controversies and International Circulations » funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (2022-2025).

Elise Massicard holds degrees in Political Science (Sciences Po), Turkish Studies (INALCO) and Social Sciences (Freie Universität Berlin); she received her PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po in 2002. A permanent researcher at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) since 2003, she was first affiliated with the Centre d’études administratives, politiques et sociales in Lille, before joining the Turkish and Ottoman Studies team at the EHESS in 2008. In 2009, she was Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. Between 2010 and 2014, she was a research fellow at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, Turkey, and the head of the Observatoire de la vie politique turque (OVIPOT). Back in France she became a member of CERI/Sciences Po. She was a visiting scholar at Northwestern University (USA) in 2019.

She is a founding member and a member of the Editorial Board of the European Journal of Turkish Studies. She is also a member of the Editorial board of the journals Critique Internationale, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, and Diyar. Zeitschrift für Osmanistik Türkei- und Nahostforschung (Germany). Elise Massicard is a founding member of the Consortium of European Symposia on Turkey. Since 2017, she is vice chair of the Scientific Interest Group “Middle East and Muslim World”, (GIS MOMM), and she chairs its priority project on structuring French research on Turkish worlds. She is the author of The Alevis in Turkey and Europe: Identity and Managing Territorial Diversity (Routledge, 2012) and of Street-level Governing. Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey, (Stanford University Press, 2022). She coedited with Nicole Watts Negotiating political power in Turkey: Breaking up the Party (Routledge, 2013). She coedited with Marc Aymes and Benjamin Gourisse Order and Compromise. Government Practices in Turkey from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century (Brill, 2015). She co-edited with Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot Contemporary Populists in Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).