Gizem Sivri
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.
During her doctoral studies, she received a 3-year PhD scholarship from Gerda Henkel Stiftung in 2018 and a pre-doctoral research grant from Zeit Stiftung, Trajectories of Change Program in 2017. In 2019, during her second year of PhD studies, she earned the third prize in the 10th Dicle Koğacıoğlu Essay Competition, organized by Sabancı University's Gender and Women's Studies (SU Gender), for her article titled "Being a Woman in Prison: Women’s Criminality and Women’s Incarceration in the Ottoman Empire (1840-1919).
In addition to her academic achievements, Dr. Sivri taught Ottoman social, political, and legal history for six semesters at the Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at LMU 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. She is collaborating on this project with the BGSMCS at the Free University of Berlin and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University. Simultaneously, she is working on transforming her dissertation into a book manuscript. Her primary areas of interest include Ottoman history, historical criminology, the history of prisons, legal history, as well as women’s and gender history.