I am a historian, visual artist, chess enthusiast, occasional podcast host, and classical guitar player living between the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. and Istanbul, Turkey. I was born in Istanbul in 1994 and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island amid the aftershocks of the 2008 global financial crisis. I went to Wesleyan University for my BA as a QuestBridge Scholar. There, I studied in the interdisciplinary College of Social Studies, where I gained a strong background in modern European history, political and social theory, economics, and political science. My thesis on the Gezi Park Protests won my department’s best thesis award, and, more importantly, imparted on me a lifetime of curiosity about how the past inflects (and inflicts!) the present. In 2016, a few months after graduation, I became a History Teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, NY. Teaching sleepy-eyed eighth graders about the Gunpowder Empires first thing in the morning confirmed my desire to pursue graduate studies in history, and I enrolled at the New School for Social Research for my MA in Historical Studies. I graduated in 2019 and, in the same year, started my Ph.D. in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University.

With a broad set of research interests and easily seduced by a laguna in the literature, my explorations in the Ottoman State Archives led me to a set of metal mines in Eastern Asia Minor. Over the last several years, I have been researching the mines of Keban and Ergani, trying to understand their daily workings, relationship to the state, and the broader Upper Euphrates Valley. To do so, I not only became proficient in various paleographic traditions in the Ottoman Empire, but also learned how to understand geological sciences, examined mining sites worldwide, and conducted fieldwork on site. Already proficient in Turkish, French, and Arabic, I learned German, Kurmancî Kurdish, and Western Armenian and traveled across Europe, Turkey, and Armenia for archival research.

In my research, I’m drawn to the seemingly mundane and unglamorous stories—of workers, animals, landscapes, and materials—that quietly reveal how larger political and economic systems function. My practice is initially, and primarily, empirical: I follow my sources until I have a picture of how different configurations of power function in a given space, and how they change over time. I am especially interested in how economic structures shape social relations, ideas about the material world, and political expression. Attentive to the dialectical relationship between form and structure, I aim to theorize from the ground and generate new historiographical forms rooted in the object I am studying.