Dear Colleagues,
OTSA would like to thank everyone who made it out to our conference in Madison, WI October 9-11. It was a truly enriching three days of presentations on a wide array of exciting research in our field. As our organization grows, we hope to continue to host meeting like it on a regular basis. We also would like to extend an enormous thanks to the Kemal Karpat Center for Turkish Studies at the University of Wisconsin for hosting, especially Daniel Stolz, Deniz Balgamış, and Deniz Yüce for their labors in making the conference run smoothly, and to our co-sponsors, the Keyman Center for Modern Turkish Studies at Northwestern University and the Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies at Columbia University for their financial support.
Today I am writing with two announcements. First, OTSA will be holding its annual board elections from October 28th to November 11th. We will be holding elections for three positions--one standing board member, one student member, and one member of our nominations committee. You can find a list of the nominees and their motivation statements below. In order to vote in those elections, you must be a fully paid member of OTSA by October 28th. If you are not yet a paid member you can sign up at the link below. If you are unsure if your membership is current, please respond directly to this email and we will confirm.
Secondly, please save the date for our annual members meeting, which will be held on zoom this year on November 18th from 12-2PM EST. At this meeting you will hear updates about our association's activities, hear our election results, celebrate our award winners and have an opportunity to provide input on our future plans.
Information on how to register for the annual members meeting will be distributed to paid members only in the near future.
Thank you again for your support and please stay tuned for more announcements and updates shortly.
Sincerely,
James Ryan
Executive Director
Candidates for the OTSA Board and Nominations Committee
Candidates for Board Seat (Outgoing member, Can Nacar)
- Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Bio:
Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a feminist anthropologist of Muslim societies at UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity, in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. In October 2026 she takes up a Professorship at UCL. She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. Her work develops two theoretical frameworks. Takhayyul, political imagination drawn from Classical Arabic epistemology. And mahremiyet, the everyday making of intimacy and privacy norms. Together these anchor a career-long project on desire, subjectivity, and Islamic imagination across Turkey, the Balkans, Lebanon, and beyond.
She is the author of Working Out Desire: An Ethnographic Account of Female Self-Making in Metropolitan Istanbul (Syracuse University Press, 2021) and Principal Investigator of the €1.48M ERC Starting Grant TAKHAYYUL (2019 to 2025), which examined the imaginative landscapes of Islamist politics across the Balkan-to-Bengal complex. She is Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Islam (Springer Nature), where she introduced a revise-before-review model to support structurally disadvantaged scholars and launched a rapid-commentary section for emergent issues.
Her forthcoming books include Imagining Turkey (Cambridge University Press) and Is Critique Islamic? (Columbia University Press). She co-directs the Feminist Mobilities Network (FemNET) and serves as a Council Member of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. She reviews for the European Research Council and other international funders. Her scholarship brings feminist and decolonial frameworks to bear on the study of Muslim societies, re-theorising political imagination beyond Eurocentric and gender-neutral models.
Motivation Statement:
I am honoured to be nominated to the OTSA Board. My work sits at the meeting point of feminist anthropology, Islamic thought, and the study of political imagination, and I care deeply about how our field sustains scholars working across disciplinary and regional divides. If elected, I would bring my editorial experience to conversations about OTSA's publishing and awards, with particular attention to lowering barriers for early-career and structurally disadvantaged colleagues. I would also draw on my funding and network-building work to help strengthen OTSA's international reach and its links with feminist and decolonial scholarship. Turkish and Ottoman studies are richest when they hold together historical depth and contemporary critique. I would be glad to serve an organisation that makes that breadth possible, and to help ensure its Board reflects the full disciplinary and methodological variety of its members.
- Lisel Hintz
Bio:
Lisel Hintz is Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS University of London. She previously held positions at Cornell University, Barnard College, and Johns Hopkins SAIS. She received her PhD in Political Science from George Washington University. With a regional focus on Turkey and its neighborhoods, Dr. Hintz examines how contestation over various identities – e.g., national, ethnic, gender, civilizational – shapes politics from international to subnational levels. Her recent publications aim at audio-visualizing the political science toolkit while centering the study of Turkey. These include award-winning articles in Politics & Gender, Perspectives on Politics, and British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Her work also includes her 2018 book from Oxford University Press, Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey, as well as publications in Democratization, Security Studies, Nationalities Papers, and European Journal of International Relations. Her current book projects, both under contract with university presses, examine popular culture as political battleground in Turkey’s autocratization and the AKP’s populist hyper-mediatization of Others in foreign policy and grand strategy-making.
Dr. Hintz has served on the executive committees of organizations including the Project on Middle East Political Science, the APSA MENA Politics Section, and the APSA Interpretive Methods Section. She co-founded the SAIS Media and Politics Initiative. For 168 weeks, she has run a writing solidarity group for scholars from/working on the MENA region. Since its founding following the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, 188 scholars have participated; 26 have received their PhDs. Please contact her to join/share!
Motivation Statement
I am honored to be nominated and eager to serve on the OTSA Board. In my 15+ years studying Turkey, I have been consistently impressed with the varied ways OTSA supports knowledge production in Turkish and Ottoman studies and, crucially, the individuals producing that knowledge. Among many OTSA initiatives, the February 2021 Turkey Now! event featuring many scholars from Boğaziçi did both, and thus is exemplary of the type of programming I would foster as Board member. Because many OTSA members also face incursions on academic freedom, as well as visa hurdles and other challenges impacting their scholarly prospects (and wellbeing), my contributions would center around boosting access to academia and building community. I would establish an interactive networking platform, curate an OTSA opportunities database, develop the OTSA Co-Op with inspiration from my Interpretive Methods Section’s series, and organize professional development webinars to overcome “hidden curriculum” disparities/demystify academia.
Candidates for Graduate Student Member of the Board (Outgoing member, Brittany White)
- Hazal Aydın
Bio:
Hazal Aydın is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Boston University, currently conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul. She holds a BA in Sociology from Boğaziçi University and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University. Before joining BU, she was a research assistant on the ERC-funded Takhayyul Project at UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity.
Her doctoral research examines how and why people with the means to detach from politics stay attached to it under authoritarian conditions, focusing on the affective and everyday labor of sustaining resistance among activists, civil society workers, and human rights defenders in Istanbul. Her work asks what allows resistance to endure as right-wing authoritarian governments take hold worldwide. Her interests span political anthropology, affect, gender and sexuality, migration and (im)mobilities, and nationalism and citizenship. In her master's research she studied how sexual harassment becomes normalized among theatre actors in Turkey; the resulting paper, "Open Body, Theatrical Intimacy and Sexual Harassment" (forthcoming, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2028), received the Best Graduate Paper Prize from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association in 2023. Her other writing includes "Fetih Across Istanbul" (Takhayyul Working Paper Series), a district-level mapping of neo-Ottomanist place-naming and the politics of belonging, with further work in Turkish Studies (forthcoming), Allegra Lab, and Çatlak Zemin. Hazal is co-creator of the "Imagining Turkey" podcast series, which brings together scholars, artists, and writers to explore the political imaginations taking shape in, around, and about Turkey.
Motivation Statement:
I am honored to be nominated as graduate student representative on the OTSA Board. As a graduate worker and union member at Boston University, I have served as a departmental steward and lived through a strike and its aftermath. I believe questions of academic precarity, unionization, and the withdrawal of funding will only grow more urgent across academia, and especially for students. I would prioritize putting these on OTSA's agenda and connecting graduate members across institutions to share strategy. Meanwhile, my work with the Takhayyul Project connects me to scholars working across the Balkan-to-Bengal geographies, whose interventions I could bring into conversation with OTSA. My ties to activist, cultural, and civil society communities in and around Turkey can likewise bring fresh perspectives from the ground. I would also invite OTSA's own scholars onto the "Imagining Turkey" podcast as a venue for public engagement. I look forward to serving this community.
- Fatma Esen
Bio:
Fatma Esen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire, with particular emphasis on maritime history and marine life. Her dissertation asks how late Ottoman history might be understood differently when reconstructed from the empire's saltwater —from the depths of the sea to the shore and the land. To answer this question, she examines dolphin hunting in the southeastern Black Sea and sponge fisheries in the Dodecanese, situating them within the broader transformations of global marine capitalism and environmental change. Fatma received her BA in History from Middle East Technical University and her MA in History from Sabancı University. In recent years, she has conducted archival research in Istanbul and fieldwork in Trabzon for her dissertation and presented her findings at several venues. She will be a research fellow at ANAMED in the coming academic year.
Motivation Statement :
I am deeply honored to be nominated for the graduate student representative position on the Board of OTSA. As a first-generation international student whose academic life has been shaped by experiences in Türkiye and the United States, I understand many challenges graduate students face, including unequal access to funding and academic opportunities, as well as practical issues such as visa regulations and taxation. I hope to work to make OTSA a more supportive community for graduate students from diverse institutional, geographic, and economic backgrounds. I am particularly interested in improving access to academic opportunities by addressing administrative barriers, such as visa procedures for attending conferences, and raising awareness of funding inequalities, especially those affecting international recipients of grants. I would also be happy to organize virtual graduate student events that encourage the exchange of ideas and digitized sources across continents and strengthen our community within the broader MENA region.
- Fatma Deniz
Bio:
Fatma Deniz is a Ph.D. candidate at the departments of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and History at New York University. Trained as a historian, along with a double major in Political Science and International Relations, for her bachelor’s degree, she decided to pursue an academic career in History. She completed her master’s thesis in the Medieval Studies Department at Central European University and received an award of progress selected by the department. Focusing on religion, Sufism and early modern Istanbul in her master’s thesis, she wanted to expand her research in this area for her doctoral research. Her Ph.D. dissertation is tentatively titled, “The Mystical Capital: Sufis in the Making of Society and Space in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” During her academic career, she worked as a teaching assistant for different courses and taught her own courses. She worked as an editorial assistant in the Journal of Turkish Studies Review, administrative assistant for the Ottoman and Turkish Studies at NYU, Ottoman Paleography assistant at ANAMED and will work as a manager assistant at the Museum of the City of New York. She also organized panels and workshops at NYU and MESA, presented her work in different conferences. To continue her academic studies, she was awarded with prestigious fellowships such as NYU Urban Doctoral Fellowship, Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship, Burbank & Cooper Summer Fellowship, Carola Collier Berthelot Trust Fellowship, Gerda-Herkel Ph.D. Fellowship and NYU Public Humanities Fellowship.
Motivation Statement:
I am excited to be nominated as a graduate student representative on the OTSA Board for the next election cycle. I have several motivations and goals for serving in this position. First and foremost, universities in the United States are facing significant budget cuts and searching for ways to navigate these difficult circumstances. These challenges directly affect graduate students, who are often particularly vulnerable during periods of institutional and financial uncertainty. At the same time, amid the broader economic realities of our current world, graduate students—especially those in our field—are facing increasingly difficult conditions on the academic job market. Organizations such as MESA and OTSA provide graduate students with an essential community in which they can thrive, collaborate, and support one another amidst these challenges. In such circumstances, it is more important than ever to have strong, well-functioning professional institutions that actively support the next generation of scholars.
As a graduate student representative, my goal would be to bring the concerns and perspectives of graduate students to the OTSA Board, ensure that their voices are heard, and advocate for initiatives that address their needs. I would also seek to strengthen communication and collaboration between graduate students and senior scholars and to foster a more inclusive and supportive professional community.
Candidates for Nominations Committee (Outgoing member, Samuel Dolbee)
- Alp Eren Topal
Bio:
I am an assistant professor of history at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul. I received my PhD degree from Bilkent University, Department of Political Science in 2017 with my dissertation titled “From Decline to Progress: Ottoman Concepts of Reform 1600-1876.” After my PhD, I spent time at Binghamton University, NY (2017-18), Oslo University (2019-2022) and Freie University Berlin (2023-34) as post-doctoral researcher. I am a recipient of Gerda Henkel Stiftung post-doctoral scholarship (2018-19) with my project on Sadık Rıfat Paşa (d. 1857) and ERC Marie Curie grant (2019-2021) with my project on messianic conceptions of politics in the contemporary world.
My research mainly involves histories and genealogies of key social and political concepts in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era and nineteenth century. Since my dissertation not only have I consistently employed conceptual historical methods in my work, but also actively pursued the promotion and proper adaptation of such methods within Ottoman-Turkish historiography. Through long duree conceptual analysis, I have strived to shed light on some of the key questions of Ottoman historiography such as secularization, temporality, and transformation of political relations. My work has been published in Journal of Islamic Studies, Die Welt des Islams, Contributions to the History of Concepts and European Journal of International Relations among others.
Motivation Statement:
As a candidate for the Nominating Committee of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, my main motivation is to serve a scholarly community which, I believe, has been central to the development of the field in the USA and elsewhere. North American academia has been the locus of global Ottoman and Turkish studies, and I have followed the activities and contributions of the Association to the best of my ability throughout the past fifteen years. If I am elected for the Nominating Committee, I will do my best to maintain and improve the excellence I have observed so far, and strive to preserve the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusivity which has been a cornerstone of the Association’s identity and mission. In the context of the current global crisis, which has a disproportionate impact on the academic community, our commitment to humanity is what will redeem us.
- Hikmet Kocamaner
Bio:
Hikmet Kocamaner is a Visiting Academic at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). Before joining UNCW, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brandeis University, a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature in Turkey and teaching at Middle East Technical University, he came to the University of Arizona (UofA) on a Fulbright fellowship to teach Turkish. He completed a dual PhD in Anthropology and Middle East Studies at UofA in 2014.
Kocamaner is a sociocultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research has examined the intersection of religion and politics in Turkey since 2012. His first project investigated Islamic authorities’ involvement in governance, focusing on the regulation of gender and family life. His second project examines the expanding integration of media and digital infrastructures into the Diyanet’s services, asking how these infrastructures facilitate Islam’s incorporation into practices of populist governance. At Oxford, he is writing a book that brings these two strands together, examining how religious and institutional infrastructures mediate the entanglements of Islam, gender politics, and populist governance in contemporary Turkey.
Kocamaner’s writings have appeared in American Anthropologist (2026), American Ethnologist (2019), Anthropological Quarterly (2017), The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey (2024), MERIP Middle East Report (2018), and Birikim (2021). His research has been funded by Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Motivation Statement:
I would be honored to serve on OTSA’s Nominating Committee. I would help ensure that the OTSA board reflects the full intellectual breadth and disciplinary diversity of Ottoman and Turkish studies. My training across literature, anthropology, and Middle East studies, together with my work experience in Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom, have brought me into sustained conversation with scholars across disciplines, institutions, and methodological traditions. As an anthropologist of contemporary Turkey, I would bring a perspective complementing OTSA’s distinguished strengths in historical scholarship while broadening attention to scholars working on contemporary social, economic, political, religious, and cultural questions. I would approach the nominating process with a commitment to inclusivity across disciplines, career stages, institutional settings, and scholarly perspectives. I would seek outstanding candidates who can broaden participation in OTSA and ensure that its board more fully reflects the richness and range of the field.
- Zozan Pehlivan
Bio:
I am an Associate Professor of History and the Arsham & Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My research focuses on global environmental history, animal history, Indigenous histories, the history of technology and medicine, and public health. My first monograph, The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores the interrelations among climate change, ecological disequilibrium, economic inequality, and Ottoman state policy in the emergence of intercommunal violence in late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Kurdistan and the Middle East. The book is co-winner of the Ottoman Turkish Studies Association’s 2024 Book Award. I am currently working on two book projects: “Resettler Empires: How Ottomans, Americans, and Britons Conquered Grasslands” and “Empire of Immunity: Vaccination and Public Health in Ottoman Turkey.” Resettler Empires examines how American, British, and Ottoman imperial policies mobilized environmental stress to facilitate the forced resettlement of Indigenous populations in the modern era. Empire of Immunity traces the history of vaccination, vaccine technology, and public health in Ottoman Turkey from the late seventeenth century through the twenty-first century.
Motivation Statement:
I am deeply honored to be nominated to serve on the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association nomination committee. As an environmental historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Kurdistan, with research spanning animal history, the history of medicine, public health, and the political ecology of empire, I have long valued OTSA as an intellectual community defined by methodological breadth, regional diversity, and scholarly generosity. The nomination committee has an important responsibility to sustain and expand that breadth. If elected, I would approach this work with care, collegiality, and a strong commitment to identifying scholars across disciplines, career stages, and institutional settings. I would be especially attentive to colleagues working under precarious conditions in Turkey, the broader region, and beyond, as well as to early-career researchers, women, and scholars whose work may fall outside dominant academic networks. I would be honored to contribute to OTSA by helping ensure that its leadership and committees reflect the richness, diversity, and intellectual vitality of Ottoman and Turkish studies.
