Stanford Humanities Center
Morgan Sinan Tufan is a PhD candidate in Ottoman Empire and Middle Eastern history at Stanford University. In his work, he explores the construction of the border between the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Kurds during the sixteenth century. He received his double bachelor’s degree in History and Political Science from Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (2010) and his Master's in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2013). His research, which includes archive documents in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic housed in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, was featured in Borromeo & Vatin (eds.), Les Ottomans vu par eux-mêmes (2020).
SHC Project
Bordering the Kurds: Imperial Governance and Traditional Authority in Sixteenth-Century Kurdistan
‘Bordering the Kurds examines the Ottoman-Safavid border as a zone of cultural and linguistic osmosis and highlights how Kurdish principalities preserved their autonomy through innovative literary, legal, and diplomatic strategies. Challenging traditional depictions of Kurdistan as a conflict-ridden periphery and emphasizing Kurdish contributions to the early modern Islamic world, this project advocates for recognition of the region as a complex realm of diverse political entanglements. As the first historical survey from a Kurdish perspective, it will enrich our understanding of Middle Eastern history by using Kurdish ego-documents and multilingual sources to reveal how local networks influenced the Ottoman and Safavid imperial dynamics. This project provides a unique perspective in Eurasian studies, traditionally dominated by Ottoman and Safavid narratives, that also illuminates the enduring processes of border formation affecting the region today.
