Current Project:
The Collection of the Hacı Bektaş Shrine: Writing Cultural History from the Margins
Courses Taught:
- Islamic Art and Architecture
- Ottoman History
- Ottoman Turkish Texts Reading
Biography
I am a cultural historian specialising in social networks, community formation, and material culture in the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a focus on marginalised and renunciatory dervish and ‘Alid groups such as the Bektashis, the Abdals, and the Kizilbash (known as Alevis today). The Bektashis and the Kizilbash/Alevis represent the second-largest ethno-religious community in present-day Sunni-majority Turkey, with small communities still found in the Balkan countries.
Specialising in Sufi and ‘Alid groups in the Ottoman lands, I have conducted a decade of research, including extensive fieldwork in Turkey, Greece, Albania, and Romania, since earning my master’s degree (MPhil) from the University of Oxford in 2016. During this two-year program, I studied Ottoman art, architecture, and material culture while receiving training in Ottoman Turkish, alongside studies in early and medieval Islamic cultural history with a specialisation in classical Arabic. My dissertation explored the Abdal and Bektashi circles in the Ottoman Balkans, specifically the legends and the shrines of the popular warrior-saint Sarı Saltuk. Building on this foundation, I pursued a doctorate (DPhil) in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford. My thesis, entitled ‘A Sheikh Family in the Ottoman Empire: The Çelebis at the Convent of Hacı Bektaş, 1470s-1820s’, investigated the history of the Çelebis, the preeminent Bektashi sheikh family who directed the central Bektashi convent of Hacı Bektaş (Turkey) throughout the Ottoman period. Two book projects derived from my doctoral research are forthcoming in English and Turkish, with publication agreements pending signature with Koç University Press.
Following my DPhil, I was awarded a Barakat Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Khalili Research Centre at Oxford for the period 2023-24. During this fellowship, I studied a select group of objects preserved at the Hacı Bektaş shrine, specifically one hundred seals and amulets. This focused study underscored the need for a broader project to comprehensively examine the shrine’s extensive collection. To support this endeavour, I successfully secured a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for 2024-27. Entitled ‘The Collection of the Hacı Bektaş Shrine: Writing Cultural History from the Margins’, this project investigates the entire shrine collection and seeks to provide its first contextual examination in Ottoman scholarship (for more on this project, please see the link The Collection of the Hacı Bektaş Shrine: Writing Cultural History from the Margins | The Khalili Research Centre).
Research Interests:
- Renunciatory dervish groups in the pre-modern Islamicate world
- Bektashis and Kizilbash in the Ottoman Empire
- Sufi shrines and material culture
- Ottoman archival registers
- Legends and historiography
