Merve Tekgürler

Merve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History and G.J. Pigott Scholar for Academic Year 2022-2023. They have a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin. In their dissertation research, Merve is working on Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a focus on change and continuity north of the Danubian River in relation to Russian and Austrian imperial policies. They are interested in news and information networks and their impact in production and categorisation of imperial knowledge. As a part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for eighteenth century Ottoman Turkish administrative sources. Their goal is to gather a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news digests and apply distant reading methods to study patterns of trans- and intra-imperial communication. 

This year is Merve’s second year as graduate coordinator for the Eurasian Empires Workshop. With the workshop’s new focus on histories of capitalism, Merve is excited to learn more about recent approaches in Eurasian economic history. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis and doing gymnastics. They are working on landing better serves and perfecting their front-walkover.