The making of Ottoman public intellectual life.

My research examines late Ottoman intellectual life through biography, journalism, historiography, and public writing. I study intellectuals, journalists, historians, bureaucrats, and teachers not as abstract representatives of ideologies, but as historical actors whose lives moved through institutions, languages, genres, and imperial settings.

My dissertation traces the intellectual and political life of Mehmed Murad Bey, a Dagestani émigré who became a historian, journalist, novelist, and teacher of history in Istanbul. Murad’s life offers a way to study the broader conditions under which Ottoman public intellectual life was made. His writings and career connect the Caucasus, Russian education, late Ottoman Istanbul, journalism, historical writing, state service, exile, and public debate.

Methodologically, I combine close archival work with intellectual biography, global microhistory, and comparative historical perspectives. I work across Ottoman Turkish, French, Russian, English, Arabic, and Persian materials, including newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, diplomatic reports, archival registers, and printed works.

Beyond the dissertation, my work is concerned with the relationship between biography and historical method, the formation of intellectual authority, and the ways writing, teaching, journalism, and historical thought shaped public life in the late Ottoman world.