Institute for Mediterranean Studies

Zeynep Aydogan

Postdoctoral researcher
Department of Ottoman History

Zeynep Aydoğan received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Boğaziçi University, Department of History, and her doctoral degree from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Central Asian Studies. In her dissertation, entitled “Representations of Cultural Geography in Late Medieval Anatolian Frontier Narratives”, she examines different layers of Turco-Muslim identities in the epic narratives of the Muslim conquest of Anatolia. Her research interests include the cultural history of Anatolia and the Balkans between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, the formation and early historiography of the Ottoman state, the popular accounts of Turkish religio-heroic literature in the pre-modern era. After completing her PhD she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University. She taught courses on Ottoman cultural and intellectual history, medieval European, Byzantine, and Islamic history at Freie, Koç, and Boğaziçi University. As a postdoctoral researcher at GHOST, she will study the supernatural elements in a corpus of hagiographies (menakibnames) written between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.