OTES Faculty

Denise Gill is an ethnomusicologist and sound studies scholar specializing in silence, sonic, and musical practices of western Turkey and former Ottoman territories. She is centrally concerned with developing new methodologies for critical listening. Gill is the author of Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians (Oxford University Press, 2017), which received the Ruth Stone Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her current book project, Aurality and the Craft of Deathwork, explores women’s labors in Gasılhane-s of Istanbul—institutions in which local Muslim practices for washing, reciting to, and shrouding the deceased are sponsored and monitored by the state. A trained gassâle herself, Gill’s ethnography ruminates on questions of sound, listening, and the literal posthuman. A third project in process is an autoethnography of deathwork and caring for deceased refugees on Turkey’s shores of the Mediterranean. Denise Gill is also a kanun musician of Ottoman art and Mevlevi music traditions. She has performed on radio and television programs and in concert halls in Turkey, throughout North America, and in multiple cities in Europe.

Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research centers on economic, political and legal institutions and practices as well as social and cultural life in southeastern Europe and the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire. He also has a research agenda on how people imagined, represented and recorded property, territory, and nature in early periods. Furthermore, Yaycıoğlu explores how we can use digital tools to understand, visualize and conceptualize these imaginations, representations and recordings. Yaycıoğlu’s first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016) offers a rethinking of the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Currently Dr. Yaycıoğlu is working on a book project entitled The Ultimate Debt: State, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman Empire, in which he analyzes transformations in property, finance and statehood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ali Yaycıoğlu is the supervisor of a digital history project, Mapping Ottoman Epirus housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.

Ayça Alemdaroğlu is Associate Director of the Program on Turkey and a Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. A political sociologist, Dr. Alemdaroğlu focuses on social and political inequality and change in Turkey and the Middle East. Her recent work examines youth politics, and authoritarianism. In “Governing the youth in times of dissent: Essay competitions, politics of history and affective pedagogies” (forthcoming), she examines the politics of history and emotional tactics the Justice and Development Party (AKP) uses in its effort to control, administer and recruit youth. In “The AKP’s Problem with Youth”, Dr. Alemdaroğlu examines the significance of youth for the AKP and the politics of its tremendous expansion of religious education in Turkey. In an article co-authored with Sinan Erensü, "Dialectics of Reform and Repression: Unpacking Turkey's Authoritarian Turn," she analyzes the dynamics and dialectics of reform and repression in the last two decades.

Nora Barakat is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Her scholarship addresses historical experiences of law and legal practice, property and space, and capital and economy-making in the Arabic-speaking Ottoman regions, as well as the Ottoman legacy in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Bedouin Bureaucrats: Property, Law, and Nomads in Ottoman Syria, which examines late nineteenth century Ottoman modernization projects from the perspective of pastoral nomads. She is also working on a project on the history of credit relations and mortgage in the Ottoman Empire. She has published articles in The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies.

Anna Bigalow studies the devotional and material life of sacred sites shared by Muslims and non-Muslims, particularly in Turkey and India. In Turkey, her research sites include the Ayasofya/Hagia Sophia and the Panagia of Vefa Church in Istanbul and the House of Mary in Selçuk. Currently she is working a book project tentatively titled The Varieties of Secular Experience: Studies in India and Turkey, which is a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey. This work interrogates the shifting nature of secularism as experienced, interpreted, and adjudicated through shared sacred spaces. Also in progress, she is editing a volume on Islamic Objects (under contract with Bloomsbury), which surveys everyday objects and how Muslims engage and use them.

Patricia Blessing specializes in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. In her current book project, Spaces of Artifice: Interiors and the Environment in Islamic Architecture, Blessinganalyses interior spaces in relationship to nature, with an emphasis on water. While gardens within the Islamic world have been studied in great detail, less attention has been devoted to the ways in which nature is allowed to permeate buildings, and how it becomes part of interior spaces. For instance, buildings often contain water features, both indoors and in liminal courtyard spaces, supplied by aqueducts, cisterns, and open domes that allow rain water to enter. Embracing eco-critical approaches, the project contends that such water features are integral parts of the buildings’ interiors, and of the relationship between architecture and the world at large.

Blessing is the author of two books, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014; Turkish translation Koç University Press, 2018) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire(Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Eiren L. Shea (Grinnell College) and Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Dumbarton Oaks), Blessing co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 CE, Cambridge Elements series on the Global Middle Ages, ed. Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) brief introduction to the study of textiles in a primarily online format. She is the co-editor of Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100-1500, with Rachel Goshgarian (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernity, with Didem Ekici and Basile Baudez (Routledge, 2023) and The Making of Modern Muslim Selves Through Architecture, with Farhan S. Karim (Intellect, 2023). Blessing’s articles on topics ranging from funerary architecture in medieval Anatolia to stucco and textiles in Islamic and Christian monuments in Spain have been published in journals such as Muqarnas, Gesta, and Studies in Iconography, and many edited volumes. 

Blessing has received fellowships from the British Academy, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the International Center of Medieval Art, the Barakat Trust, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul. She is the German and French Content Manager for Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, and the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. 

Dr. Ebru Çetin Milci serves as a Metadata Specialist for Turkish Resources & Complex Copy at Stanford University. She is in charge of cataloging a diverse array of materials, including modern and historical Turkish resources, with a particular focus on monographs, lithographs, political and cultural ephemera, as well as Stanford Library's extensive Ottoman world holdings. Ebru Çetin Milci has over 15 years of experience in teaching Turkish language and literature at high schools and Galatasaray University. Beyond her contributions to academia, Dr. Cetin Milci has also held positions at companies such as Facebook, where she has shared her language expertise. Dr. Çetin Milci's expertise as a linguist extends to Arabic, Persian, Armenian, and various branches of Turkic languages, while her academic research centers on the history of Turkish/Turkic languages, particularly the 17th and 18th-century Gregorian Zone Kipchak Turkish law texts that was written with Armenian scripts. She is proficient in Turkish, Ottoman, Kipchak branch Turkic languages, Armenian, Arabic, and Persian. 

Saadet Ebru Ergül has been teaching Turkish language and conversation courses at various levels for both graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University Language Center since 2010. Her research interests include oral proficiency assessment in Turkish, teaching Turkish through interculturality and social justice, curriculum development, Turkish language frameworks, and national language standards.

Marie Huber’s research revolves around poetry and poetics, especially of the twentieth century; comparative literature; and mystical discourses and heterodoxies in the Islamic middle ages. While Iran lies at the heart of her work, the Turkish and Ottoman worlds keep exerting their gravitational pull. She has published translations of some modern Turkish poets and is fascinated by the continuation of Rumi’s intellectual heritage in the Mevlevi tradition. She is the author of Memories of an Impossible Future: Mehdi Akhavān Sāles and the Poetics of Time (Brill, 2016).

Kelda Jamison is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist and has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the predominately Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. Dr. Jamison’s research examines how language ideologies and linguistic practices mediate the everyday productions of self- and group-making in Turkey. She is particularly interested in understanding the political economy of language use: how particular language varieties (Turkish, Kurdish) are deployed—in what contexts, to what purposes, and with what histories of association for their speakers and the communities they are understood to represent. 

Burcu Karahan is a specialist in late 19th and early 20th-century Ottoman and Turkish literatures, with a particular focus on the novel, literary translation, sexuality, and Ottoman modernization. Her current research and translation project delves into erotic fiction from the Second Constitutional Era, examining its connections to national and literary history. In addition to her research, Karahan also engages in literary translations from Ottoman literature. She teaches a wide array of courses on literature and culture, including Ottoman, contemporary Turkish, and Middle Eastern literature in translation, as well as graphic novels. She also offers language courses on Ottoman Turkish, Turkish reading knowledge, and translation.

Trained as a political and historical sociologist, Dr. Keskin-Kozat is interested in how power inequalities within and between communities shape, and are shaped by, the processes of identity formation and institution-building. Her research interests focus on modernization, nation-state building, religion, and gender in the context of modern Turkey, Middle East and the United States of America. Her M.A. thesis explored how Turkey’s nationalist, Islamist and feminist activists in the 20thcentury interacted with each other through the binarism of secular modernity and religious traditionalism, and thereby failed to challenge the predominant forms of discrimination within and beyond their particular communities. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the limits of power and resistance, exploring the asymmetric negotiations and economic modernization efforts during the Marshall Plan in Turkey (1947-52). She currently serves as Director of Finance & Operations at the Stanford History Department, where she leads the unit's operational, financial, human, and infrastructural resources in partnership with faculty and staff leadership. She also serves on School-level operational committees and University-level fellowship review panels. 

Pauline Lewis is responsible for curating and managing Stanford Library’s rich collection of materials related to Turkish and Arabic speaking societies, including manuscripts and aartifacts, political and cultural ephemera, as well as Stanford Library’s extensive holdings related to the Ottoman world. Her academic research focuses on the history of transnational technology in Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies. Her article “Telegraphs-in-use: Submarine Cables in the Ottoman Empire” has been submitted to History of Science and currently under review.

Dr. Gizem Sivri has joined the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie global postdoctoral fellow in September 2023. She earned her BA in history from Istanbul Bilgi University in 2014 and her MA in modern Turkish history from Boğaziçi University's ATA Institute in 2017. In 2018, she commenced her PhD at the Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. Her doctoral dissertation delves into the living conditions of women’s prisons and incarceration methods for female prisoners during the late Ottoman period (1840-1922), culminating in the award of her doctoral degree in January 2022. Shortly after completing her PhD, Dr. Sivri received an LMU-UCB postdoctoral research grant in Humanities and served as a visiting scholar at the Department of History at the University of California Berkeley during the Spring Semester of 2022. 

Dr. Sivri's current postdoctoral project centers on examining the identification and representations of Ottoman female perpetrators and narratives surrounding women’s criminal cases in late Ottoman and early republican literature and press. Her primary areas of interest include Ottoman history, historical criminology, the history of prisons, legal history, as well as women’s and gender history.

Kabir Tambar is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersections of political anthropology and the anthropology of religion. He is broadly interested in the politics of history, performances of public criticism, and varieties of Islamic practice in Turkey. Tambar’s first book, The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Belonging and the Demands of History in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2014) is a study of the politics of pluralism in contemporary Turkey, focusing on the ways that Alevi religious history is staged for public display. More generally, the book investigates how secular states govern religious differences through practices of cultural and aesthetic regulation. Tambar is currently working on a new project that examines the politics and ethics of nonviolence in Turkey.

Dr. Irmak Yazici is a Lecturer and Fellow in the Civic, Liberal, Global Education (COLLEGE) program at Stanford University. Irmak is a political scientist by training and her research broadly focuses on secularism and religion in global and comparative politics. She's particularly interested in how secular law and policies regulate the public sphere in democracies and the cases in which such regulation can foster religious nationalist ideologies. Irmak is currently working on a book project that details this complex overlap between secularism, democracy, and religious nationalism.Prior to her appointment at Stanford, Irmak was a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. 

Halil Yenigun is a comparative political theorist focusing on Muslim political thought and Islamist thought in the Middle East. He was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Abbasi Program from 2017 to 2019. He earned his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Virginia's political theory program, with his dissertation titled, "The Political Ontology of Islamic Democracy: An Ontological Narrative of Contemporary Muslim Political Thought." 

During his dissertation research, Yenigün spent the 2007-2008 academic year as a visiting scholar in the Middle Eastern Studies Center at the American University in Cairo (AUC) to explore the context and the scene of the thinkers he studied. Continuing his academic track, he joined Istanbul Commerce University as a research assistant, and later, as an assistant professor of political science from 2011 to 2016. At the same time, he contributed as a research fellow at Sabancı University's Istanbul Policy Center for the Project on the Middle East and Arab Spring (POMEAS). Subsequently, he was selected as a fellow of Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe (EUME) at the Transregional Studies Forum in Berlin to deepen his research on Muslim political thought during the 2016-2017 period.

After coming back to the U.S., Halil taught courses on political science, Middle East history and sociology, and Muslim political thought at institutions such as Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and San Jose State University from 2017 to 2022. His writings have appeared in a range of edited volumes and journals, including Third World Quarterly and Turkish Studies, as well as digital platforms like opendemocracy.net and Jadaliyya. Furthermore, he has been occasionally invited to provide his views on topics such as Muslim political thought, Islamism, peace activism, and Turkish democracy in various media outlets.

Beyond his scholarly pursuits, Dr. Yenigun participated in the civil society landscape of his native Turkey at several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) advocating for human rights, social justice, and free circulation of ideas, either as a founder or board member. A noteworthy part of his advocacy work includes his association with Academics for Peace, a group of Turkish academics rallying for peace and human rights.

Serkan Yolaçan’s research straddles anthropology and history to examine how transregional networks of business, religion, and education act as conduits of political change in the Middle East and Asia. His book project, Time Travelers of Baku: Conversion and Revolution in West Asia, brings to light the role of the Caucasus and its erstwhile Azeri diaspora in connecting the modern histories of Iran, Turkey, and Russia. His recent publications include “Azeri Networks Through Thick and Thin: West Asian Politics from a Diasporic Eye,” published in Journal of Eurasian Studies.