Future Directions

My future research develops from the dissertation in several connected directions. The first is the long nineteenth century. My dissertation focuses strongly on the Hamidian period, but the problems it studies began earlier. I am interested in the decades from the 1820s through the Tanzimat and into the late nineteenth century, when Ottoman statesmen, intellectuals, diplomats, educators, and journalists reworked the language of authority, justice, law, loyalty, sovereignty, and imperial survival. This direction would allow me to connect Murad’s world to earlier debates around reform, diplomacy, balance politics, centralization, and the changing political language of the Ottoman state.

The second direction is the late Ottoman Empire within a wider Mediterranean and MENA framework. I am interested in the connections among Istanbul, Cairo, the Caucasus, North Africa, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean. Rather than treating Ottoman, Turkish, Arab, Balkan, and Caucasian histories as separate national stories, I want to follow the movements of people, texts, ideas, institutions, and political vocabularies across these spaces. This includes questions of colonialism, anti-colonial discourse, imperial competition, reform, migration, war, public opinion, and sovereignty.

A third direction is contemporary Turkey and the Middle East through historical sociology. My training is historical, but many of the questions that motivate my work remain active in the present: political authority, religion and public life, nationalism, minorities, migration, war, historical memory, media, and the uses of the past. I do not want to collapse the nineteenth century into the present. I want to understand how imperial and later formations continue to shape contemporary political and social life.

I am also interested in biography as a research and teaching method. Individual lives make large historical processes visible without turning them into abstractions. Through biography, one can study empire, migration, education, bureaucracy, exile, intellectual formation, public opinion, and political crisis at the level of lived experience. Future projects may use this approach comparatively, bringing Ottoman, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and global cases into the same analytical field.

Finally, I want to continue thinking about history education, public discourse, and historical consciousness. Murad’s career as a teacher of history, writer of universal history, journalist, and public moralist shows how historical knowledge can become a political instrument. This problem extends beyond the late Ottoman world. I am interested in how societies teach the past, how public narratives are constructed, and how history becomes a language through which people understand crisis, identity, legitimacy, and collective futures.