Özgül Özdemir | In Search of Two First Instance Courts of Black Slavery, Userā’-yı Zenciyye Bidāyet Maḥkemesi, in the Red Sea Region: 1890–1914

Özgül Özdemir is a PhD candidate in the department of history at Stanford University. Her dissertation tentatively titled Straddling Worlds of Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth-century Red Sea region examines how the global abolitionist agenda of the empire was transformed in the local context of the Red Sea region in the Red Sea region from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The dissertation further interrogates how Ottoman representatives discussed antislavery measures in theory and how slaveholders and enslaved Africans contested or used these measures in practice. 

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Although slavery was never abolished under the Ottoman rule in the Red Sea region, the Ottoman Empire’s participation in the age of abolition still transformed, conflicted with, and shaped the practices of the slaveholders and the experiences of enslaved Africans in the region. Özgül’s writings and book reviews have been published or are forthcoming in UNESCO General History of Africa, the Journal of Global Slavery, the English Historical Review, and the Journal of Slavery & Abolition. For the academic year, 2024–2025, she is the recipient of Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellowship provided by the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.

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