Muhammet Topal

Academic Portfolio and Personal Blog

Presentations

Conference presentations and talks

Center of Power: Social Networks and Agency in Late Ottoman Istanbul.
Center of Power: Social Networks and Agency in Late Ottoman Istanbul.
Finding a Place in the World: presentation image.
Finding a Place in the World: presentation image.
Finding a Place in the World: title slide.
Finding a Place in the World: title slide.
Speaking Truth to Power: presentation image.
Speaking Truth to Power: presentation image.
Speaking Truth to Power: title slide.
Speaking Truth to Power: title slide.
MESA panel.
MESA panel.
Organizing Exit at the University of Chicago.
Organizing Exit at the University of Chicago.
Center of Power at Texas A&M.
Center of Power at Texas A&M.
Center of Power at Texas A&M.
Center of Power at Texas A&M.
Panel discussion.
Panel discussion.
The Rise and Fall of a Young Turk Leader.
The Rise and Fall of a Young Turk Leader.
Seminar and workshop setting.
Seminar and workshop setting.
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Thinking from the Dual: Ontology, Theology and the Humanities through the Lens of the Muthannā · University of Lorraine · October 13–14, 2026 · Metz

This talk develops mountaineering as a relational experience of body and world, linking physical exposure, duality, and covenantal thought.

40th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference, Playing with the Scales: The Local, Regional, and Global in Middle Eastern Studies · University of Chicago · May 1–2, 2026

This presentation examines Muslim politics beyond state-centered frameworks and reads exit as a form of political agency.

6th Mid-Atlantic Ottomanist Workshop · Rutgers University · April 10–11, 2026

This paper traces translation, mediation, and bureaucratic-intellectual formation from Phanariot dragomans to the Ottoman Translation Office.

59th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association · November 22–25, 2025 · Washington, DC

This paper presents Mehmed Murad Bey’s intellectual formation as a process of individuation, political socialization, and public self-fashioning.

Education in Turkey: Actors and Practices Conference · Galatasaray University and Institut français d’études anatoliennes, IFEA · October 9–10, 2025 · Istanbul

This presentation examines history education as a site where political subjects imagine their place in the world.

History Conference in Memory of Yavuz Selim Karakışla · Boğaziçi University · May 15–16, 2025 · Istanbul

This paper follows Mehmed Murad Bey’s brief leadership in Young Turk politics through the political geography of exile, return, and rivalry.

15th Annual TAMU History Conference: Power and Agency · Texas A&M University · February 7–8, 2025 · College Station

This presentation explores the media-government-intellectual nexus in late Ottoman Istanbul through networks, agency, and urban political space.

Orient Institute Colloquium Series · July 31, 2024 · Istanbul

This talk introduces the broader dissertation project through the case of Mizancı Mehmed Murad Bey and the making of Ottoman public intellectual life.

International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference, The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal · University of Durham · July 10–12, 2024

This paper examines Egypt as imagined, narrated, and used by Ottoman intellectual émigrés during the Hamidian period.

Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies Symposium, Nineteenth-Century Global Cities and Urban Worlds · Aix-Marseille University · June 6–8, 2024

This presentation compares Istanbul and Cairo through Ottoman intellectual émigré perspectives on urban modernity and imperial transformation.