I am from Istanbul and taught there nearly a decade before taking up the post of Associate Professor in Ottoman History at Oxford. Prior to that, I studied at Harvard and held a fellowship in Berlin. As a cultural historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, I work on dreams, life writing, and urban imaginaries.
Currently, I am working on a book project, which explores the role of imagination in the making of urban communities in early modern Istanbul. I am particularly interested in the worlds of Ottoman poets, scholars and Sufis, where dreams changed lives; the dead appeared in broad daylight; and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.
Selected Publications
- Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth Century Biographer’s Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 2017)
- “How to Read an Ottoman Poet’s Dream? Friends, Patrons and the Execution of Figani (d.1532)” Middle Eastern Literatures 16.1. 2013: 48-60
- “Ottoman Biography Writing and the Halveti-Sünbüli Sheikhs of Sixteenth Century Istanbul” in Many Ways of Speaking About the Self, Ralph Elger & Yavuz Erköse eds. (Wiesbaden: 2010), 171-185.
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