Dr Hatice Yıldız

Lecturer in Modern Gender History since 1750

Biography

Background

I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. I received my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in the social sciences (Political Science BA, Historical Sociology MA) in Istanbul. In 2013, I received a postgraduate research scholarship from the Cambridge International Trust and moved to the UK. I completed my PhD degree in History at the University of Cambridge in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram. Between 2017 and 2021, I held postdoctoral research positions at Merton College (University of Oxford) and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (Harvard University). I have been teaching at the University of Edinburgh since September 2020. 

Over the past ten 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, and India. 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.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Coordinator of Histories of Gender and Sexuality Research Group

Member of genderED

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

Undergraduate teaching

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: Questioning Patriarchy')

History Dissertation

Postgraduate teaching

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

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I am happy to supervise doctoral dissertations exploring aspects of gendered employment in the late Ottoman Empire and/or colonial India. I am particularly keen on supervising comparative projects and those that focus on professional employment.

Research summary

Places: 

  • Asia 
  • Mediterranean
  • Near East

Themes: 

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

Periods: 

  • Nineteenth Century

Research interests

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.

 

Current research interests

I am currently working on a monograph which is an extended version of my doctoral thesis. It 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 in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contrary to a scholarly tradition that places the Ottoman Empire and British India in separate categories, my book highlights gendered mechanisms of adaptation and survival shared by 'peripheral' economic actors in the age of European industrial hegemony.

Affiliated research centres

  • Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History, Edinburgh Centre for Global History

Project activity

My postdoctoral 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.

Hatice Yıldız, 'Parallels and Contrasts in Gendered Histories of Industrial Labour in Bursa and Bombay 1850 – 1910', The Historical Journal, v. 60, no. 2 (June 2017).

Hatice Yıldız, 'The Politics of Time in Colonial Bombay: Labor Patterns and Protest in Cotton Mills', Journal of Social History 54, no.1 (Fall 2020). DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shz016

 

Forthcoming:

Can Nacar and Hatice Yıldız, 'Labour History' in The Cambridge Companion to Ottoman History, Alex Norman Wick, ed., Cambridge University Press.

Hatice Yıldız, 'Gender and Labor', in The Oxford Handbook of Global Labor History, Oxford University Press.

Hatice Yıldız, Gender and Factory Work in Ottoman Bursa and Bombay, 1880 - 1910.

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