Merve Tekgürler | Borderland Perspectives on Spatial Humanities: A/Nationalism in Ottoman Eastern Europe

Please join us for the third Eurasian Empires workshop meeting of the Academic Year 2023-24. Merve Tekgürler will share a chapter titled “Borderland Perspectives on Spatial Humanities: A/Nationalism in Ottoman Eastern Europe."  

About the Speaker

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Merve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an MS student in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. In 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford. Tekgürler's dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.

As part of their dissertation project, Tekgürler is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiques and employ computational text analysis methods. In 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories from the 18th and 19th centuries.