Biography

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia working on slavery and social history in the Early Modern and Modern Middle East.

In 2018, I graduated as a high honor student from Istanbul Bilgi University and started my master's degree at Koç University Comparative Studies in History and Society. During my undergraduate and graduate studies, I took courses at the History Department of Ghent University within the framework of the Erasmus Exchange Program and I interned at the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

My dissertation project explores the history of the Imperial Slave Market in Istanbul from several layers by aligning with the interdisciplinary methods from spatial, legal, cultural, architectural, and digital history. In my research, I am trying to understand the human experiences of the market, explore its historical significance, uncover its architectural structure and spatial organization, reconstruct the economic and legal linkages between the market and the Ottoman state, and trace their changes over time from a macro and micro scale.