About our staff

I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. I completed my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in the social sciences (Political Science BA, Historical Sociology MA), through scholarships from governmental bodies and universities (TUBITAK, Koc University). I moved to the UK in 2013, having received a postgraduate research scholarship from the Cambridge International Trust. I completed my PhD degree in History in 2018 at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Prof Sujit Sivasundaram. Between 2017 and 2020, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. I took up the position of Lecturer in Gender History at the University of Edinburgh in 2020. Between 2020 and 2021, I was also a Visiting Fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University.

During the past eight years I worked in archives spanning three countries and seven cities: Istanbul, Bursa, Cambridge, London, Mumbai, Delhi, and Kolkata. I have presented elements of my work at workshops and conferences in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Turkey, India, and the US. I provided supervisions and taught classes in global, gender, and labour history, on various topics from the Indian Rebellion to Ottoman craftswomen in the nineteenth century.

Coordinator of Histories of Gender and Sexuality Research Group

Member of genderED

Co-founder of Colonial Ports and Global History (CPAGH)

Summary of research interests

• Asia
• Mediterranean
• Near East

• Comparative & Global History
• Economic History
• Gender
• Imperialism
• Labour

• Nineteenth Century

My research lies at the intersection of gender, economic and social histories of South Asia and the Middle East. I am concerned with the gendering of occupational categories that emerged in conjunction with economic liberalisation, industrial development, and bureaucratic consolidation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My PhD thesis and subsequent work examined the spatial and temporal aspects of women's and men's work, concepts and categories of skill, technology and specialist knowledge in textile factories of Ottoman Western Anatolia and Western India.

I am currently working on a monograph which is an extended version of my doctoral thesis. This study explores the ways in which gendered notions of skill, paid work, domesticity and technology shaped labour processes and politics in the silk factories of Bursa and the cotton mills of Bombay between 1850 and 1910. Contrary to a scholarly tradition that placed the late Ottoman and British Indian experiences in distinct categories, my book highlights common mechanisms of adaptation and survival in the age of European industrial hegemony. These involved the development of flexible and low-cost production strategies which confined female workers to crude and subsidiary tasks and associated skill with masculine virtues.

My second project explores gendered means of participation in upper-middle class professions including medicine and law. I am specifically interested in the notions of skill, time, and collective identity as crafted by Indian and Ottoman female physicians in the early twentieth century.

Feminist Histories of Work from 1750 to WWII

Ottoman Modernities: Society, Economy, Culture in the 19th Century

Contributions:

Historical Skills and Methods I (Pathway: 'Gender and Imperial History')

Global Connections since 1450 (Course Organiser)

The Global Economy since 1750 (Lectures: 'Asia on the Verge of Great Divergence' and 'The Industrial Revolution: Asia's Divergent Path')

Introduction to Historiography (Lecture: 'Fatema Mernissi')

History Dissertation

Gender, Empire, and Labour in the Nineteenth Century: Perspectives from the Wider World 

Contributions:

Historical Research: Skills and Sources (Pathway: 'Women in Ottoman History: Using Life Writings and Images')

Historical Methodology (Pathway: 'E. P. Thompson and His Legacy')

Economic and Social Theory for Historians (Seminar: 'Marx and Historical Materialism')

Dissertation, Taught MSc in History

I am happy to supervise doctoral dissertations on gender and labour in the period between 1850 to WWII. I am particularly keen on supervising comparative projects and those that focus on industrial or white collar employment.