Teaching Statement

My teaching is shaped by the conviction that history is not a fixed narrative to be memorized, but a method of inquiry through which students learn to read evidence, compare interpretations, and understand how people have made sense of changing worlds. My academic formation across Turkey, France, and the United States has exposed me to different pedagogical traditions: exam oriented instruction in Istanbul, interdisciplinary political and historical inquiry in Paris, seminar based archival training at the École pratique des hautes études, and learner centered pedagogy at the University of Arizona. These experiences have made me attentive to the different ways students enter the classroom. Some arrive with strong regional or disciplinary background. Others encounter the Middle East, Islam, Ottoman history, or historical method for the first time. My aim is to build classrooms where both groups can learn together through structure, curiosity, and critical engagement.

At the center of my teaching is active, source centered learning. I want students to understand not only what happened in the past, but how historical knowledge is produced. In my courses, students work with newspapers, political texts, memoirs, visual materials, maps, speeches, travel accounts, and contemporary media sources. I ask them to consider authorship, audience, genre, translation, silence, and context. This approach helps students see that history is built from incomplete and contested evidence, and that interpretation is not an obstacle to historical understanding but the practice through which historical knowledge becomes possible.

My classroom practice is designed to make students active participants in this process. One technique I use regularly is rotating group discussion. Students first work in small groups on a guiding question drawn from the day’s readings. Each student is then assigned a number and regroups with students from other tables, where they explain the conclusions of their original group. In a short period of time, the whole class reviews the central arguments, examples, and problems of the readings through students’ own voices. This method creates accountability without making discussion intimidating. It also prevents participation from being dominated by a few students.

I also design assignments that connect historical inquiry to public debate. In my Introduction to Political Islam course, students complete a media analysis project in which they compare how different media outlets present a topic related to the course. Before they begin, I introduce possible formats, including analytical essays, podcasts, short videos, and websites. Students then analyze authorship, framing, political perspective, and evidence, while connecting their findings to course concepts. This assignment develops historical thinking, media literacy, comparative analysis, and public communication.

Because many of my courses involve sensitive subjects, I pay particular attention to the conditions under which discussion happens. Topics such as religion and politics, minority histories, colonialism, nationalism, war, political violence, racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, gender, and contemporary Middle Eastern conflicts require both intellectual openness and pedagogical structure. I try to make the classroom a space where students can examine difficult materials with precision, historical context, and respect. This means slowing down immediate reactions, defining terms carefully, separating analytical disagreement from personal attack, and asking students to ground their claims in evidence.

I use primary source workshops to train students in historical interpretation. When students read an Ottoman newspaper excerpt, a political manifesto, a travel narrative, or a colonial report, I ask them first to identify the author, audience, purpose, and historical setting. Then we move to larger questions: what does the source reveal, what does it hide, what assumptions does it carry, and what kinds of historical arguments can or cannot be built from it? In courses where students have little prior background, I also use maps, timelines, vocabulary sheets, short contextual lectures, and low stakes reading questions.

My teaching experience has prepared me to design and deliver courses independently across several fields. At the University of Arizona, I have taught Introduction to Political Islam, Middle East Ethnic and Religious Minorities, and Religion of Islam as Instructor of Record. I have also worked as a Graduate Teaching Associate in courses including Middle Eastern Humanities, History of the Modern Middle East, Islamic Civilization, What is Politics?, and The Roman Empire.

My formal pedagogical training has strengthened this practical experience. At the University of Arizona, I completed the Graduate Certificate in College Teaching. This formal training is described separately in the College Teaching Certificate section. I design courses by beginning with clear learning objectives and then aligning readings, classroom activities, assignments, and assessments with those objectives.

I am prepared to teach a wide range of courses in history, Middle East studies, Islamic studies, and global studies. At the introductory and survey level, I can teach World History, World Civilizations, The Modern World, The History of Nation States, Europe from 1789 to 1914, The Interwar Period, The Cold War World, The World from the Atomic Bomb to the Internet, and Global History since 1945. In Middle Eastern and Ottoman history, I can teach The Middle East since 1800, The Ottoman Empire to 1800, The Ottoman Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century, The Modern Middle East, Islamic Civilization, Political Islam, Religion and Politics in the Muslim World, and Minorities in the Middle East.

At the upper level, I can offer more specialized courses that build from my research and teaching experience while remaining accessible to students from different majors. These include Ottoman Biographies, Biography and History, Ottoman Intellectual History, Journalism and Public Life in the Middle East, War and Society in the Modern Middle East, Empire and Nationalism, Migration and Mobility in the Mediterranean, History Education and the Making of Political Subjects, and The Middle East through Popular Culture. I am also prepared to teach methodology courses, including Introduction to Historical Methods, MENA Methods, Historiography, Archival Research, Source Criticism, and Biography as Historical Method.

Inclusivity and accessibility are central to my teaching practice. I do not understand inclusivity only as the addition of diverse materials, although that matters. I understand it also as a matter of course structure. Students participate more fully when they know what is expected of them, when assignments are explained clearly, when grading criteria are transparent, and when difficult material is broken into manageable steps. In my courses, I try to create these conditions through clear syllabi, guided reading questions, staged assignments, regular feedback, and multiple forms of participation.

Ultimately, my goal as a teacher is to help students develop habits of critical reading, analytical writing, historical reasoning, and intellectual generosity. I want them to leave my courses with more than information about a region or period. I want them to understand how narratives are constructed, how power shapes knowledge, how historical actors navigated the worlds they inherited, and how the past remains active in the present. Teaching, for me, is a form of shared inquiry. It gives students tools to think historically, and it asks them to take seriously the complexity of other lives, other places, and other times.