My interest in history began in childhood. My father, a geography teacher, often took me to ancient cities and museums across western Anatolia such as Ephesus, Aprodisias, and Miletus; he gifted me historical comics and told stories of legends and migrations. On my mother’s side, my family migrated from Crete in the early twentieth century due to social unrest between the Christian subjects and Muslims, and on my father’s side from Thessaloniki to western Anatolia during the Balkan Wars in 1912 so the major turning points in Turkish history were present in my own family’s memory. This early exposure cultivated my curiosity about history, identity, and belonging, and encouraged me to see the past as a living force in shaping who we are. As a historian, this drives me to focus on Ottoman imperialism in Yemen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in my doctoral research.
Growing up in Turkey, I also became deeply aware of the ways in which religion and politics intertwine in public life. As a high school student, I was fascinated by public debates that revealed how religious language could shape national identity and political legitimacy. Since the early 2000s, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), these tensions have become especially visible. The government’s populist religious discourse has challenged the secular foundations of the Republic, redefining the relationship between Islam and national politics. Observing this transformation sparked my early intellectual interest in how religion operates not only as a system of belief but also as a political and moral force that shapes institutions and everyday life.
Motivated by these questions, I chose the social sciences track in high school and ranked 79th out of two million students on Turkey’s national university entrance exam. This achievement earned me a full scholarship to study history at Koç University, one of the country’s most prestigious institutions. My undergraduate education deepened my interest in the political uses of religion and the moral complexities of modernization in the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. After earning my bachelor’s degree, I continued my education at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, pursuing an M.A. in Comparative History. I also earned a certificate in Religious Studies, which encouraged the historical and interdisciplinary study of religion—from Antiquity to modernity—through courses across History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Political Science. CEU’s intellectual environment, rooted in the values of open society, academic freedom, and critical inquiry, shaped my ethical commitment to scholarship that bridges disciplinary and cultural divides.
The forced relocation of CEU from Budapest to Vienna soon after I graduated further illuminated the political and moral dimensions of my field. From a religious studies perspective, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s framing of Hungary as a “Christian nation” demonstrated how religious identity can be mobilized to sacralize political authority and exclude pluralist or cosmopolitan voices. The government’s campaign against George Soros and CEU, couched in nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, transformed academic freedom into a moral struggle over the soul of the nation. In contrast, CEU’s commitment to open society principles—critical inquiry, tolerance, and transnational collaboration—embodied a secular and inclusive vision of public life. This conflict revealed how religious symbolism and political theology continue to shape the moral boundaries of modern nation-states, reinforcing my determination to study how religion functions as both a moral language and a mechanism of power.
Recognizing the centrality of linguistic skills to historical research, I began studying Arabic after my undergraduate years to engage directly with Islamic primary sources. I continued studying Arabic for seven years throughout my master’s and Ph.D. programs, later adding French in 2019 to broaden my access to both European and Middle Eastern archives. I can now read complex scholarly and historical texts in Arabic and French, am fluent in English, native in Turkish, and proficient in Ottoman Turkish. These languages allow me to bridge sources across imperial, colonial, and local contexts, an essential skill for my dissertation research.
These formative experiences—my family’s migration history, my intellectual engagement with the entanglement of religion and politics in modern Turkey, my interdisciplinary and multilingual training, and my moral development through civic participation—collectively inform my dissertation. My project examines Ottoman administration in Yemen in the 1910s and 1920s, focusing on how imperial officials and local actors negotiated political legitimacy through religious discourse. I argue that Ottoman governance in Yemen reflected a complex interplay between religious authority and colonial practice within the broader inter-imperial competition in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. By integrating religious studies, imperial history, and questions of ethics and legitimacy, my dissertation seeks to illuminate how religion functioned both as a source of moral meaning and as a tool of power in the late Ottoman world. In doing so, it contributes to a broader understanding of how religious and ethical discourses shape imperial authority and the moral imagination of empire.
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