Stanford Humanities Center
Morgan Sinan Tufan researches the history of the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and the broader Middle East, with a focus on border formation between the Ottomans, Safavids, and Kurds in the sixteenth century. He earned a Master’s in History from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in 2013. His research, based on archival documents in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic from Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, has been featured in Les Ottomans vu par eux-mêmes (2020) and the Journal Asiatique with his article Analyse du Mülk-nāme de Sultan Suleiman pour les Princes of Kurdistan (2024).
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.
