I'm a historian and artist currently living in Providence, RI.

I was born in Istanbul and moved to Great Neck, NY when I was 11. I became a QuestBridge National College Match finalist and went to Wesleyan University, where I studied in the interdisciplinary College of Social Studies. After graduating in 2016, I taught history at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn for a few years while completing an MA in Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research. In 2019, began my Ph.D. in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University, where I taught a range of classes in Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Islamic history.

In September 2026, I defended my dissertation entitled The Imperial Minescape: Labor, Nature, and the Pursuit of “Cheap” Metal in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire. This project asks how the Upper Euphrates Valley was transformed into what I call an imperial minescape over the long eighteenth century. At the silver, gold, copper, and lead mines of Keban and Ergani—established in the 1720s under the Imperial Mint—extraction did more than draw revenue from beneath the earth. It reorganized the surrounding landscape, inhabitants, forests, arable land, and animals into a single field of extraction, binding geology, labor, nature, and state in the effort to turn rock into coins, weapons, and imperial revenue. Working outward from previously unexamined document collections, I follow the mines' daily workings alongside the lives caught up in them: furnace-owning miners who slid into debt bondage, peasants compelled to provision grain and charcoal, sarrafs and financiers, militias, rebels, and semi-nomadic mule drivers. Drawing on political ecology, labor history, and the historical-materialist tradition, I argue that coercion and market exploitation coexisted in the mining economy without either becoming generalized. This reading resists the familiar teleology in which any trace of free labor or capital circulation signals a march toward capitalism.

I co-convene the interdisciplinary Minescapes Working Group, part of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, which meets monthly to workshop new work on extraction across different times and places. I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson School and the Department of History at Brown University, where I am working on my first book on the relationship between global silver flows and domestic mining in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

For any questions or queries, please send me an email at contact@derenertas.com.