Research

My dissertation, Becoming “Zenci”: Formulating Race in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914, weaves together an intellectual and sociocultural exploration of race, slavery, and blackness in the Ottoman Empire by placing the history of enslaved and manumitted Africans at the center of its focus. By considering the question of race, slavery, and blackness in the Ottoman context diachronically, while utilizing a synchronic understanding of its production across different social contexts,  my research connects slavery in the Ottoman Empire to the global slave trade, the making of racial categories in the Middle East and the formation of imperial hierarchies in the Ottoman Empire.

"Arap Bacı’nın Ara Muhaveresi: Under the Shadow of the Ottoman Empire and Its Study". YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 3 (2021 ): 177-183 (read)

Through the figure of Arap Bacı, this essay explores how the histories of the African diaspora in the Ottoman Empire have been largely absented in Istanbul Studies, Ottoman Studies, and, by extension, Middle Eastern Studies. This essay identifies several layers - historiographical, disciplinary, epistemological, theoretical, methodological - wherein the absence and marginalization of the African diaspora has taken place, as well as how these histories might expand new research avenues for these fields.

”Rethinking Turkish Multiculturalism” in Central European History, pending

This article charts the convergence of domestic cultural policy and foreign policy by highlighting a triangular entanglement between Turkey, the African continent, and the European Union. By focusing on the Turkish History Foundation's (Tarih Vakfı) oral history project on the Afro Turks (Sessiz Bir Geçmişten Sesler, or Voices from a Silent Past), I argue that attempts to anesthetize the past in favor of enfolding Afro-Turks into nationalist narratives of citizenship and belonging, in fact, unsettle deeper tensions between official Turkish history and this “silenced” history. Moreover, through highlighting the triangular entanglement between Turkey, the African continent, and the European Union, this essay troubles the relationship between Turkey’s excavation of Ottoman era “diversity” and its neoliberal investment(s) in multiculturalism. 

Slavs & Tartars’ Pickle Bar Podcast: A Brief History of the African Diaspora in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey