About

My interest in Turkish philology took shape in high school and led me to the Faculty of Letters at the University of Istanbul, where I studied Turkish Language and Literature. That formative period remains the foundation of everything I have done since.

In 2016 I moved to Strasbourg for graduate study. It was there, through my work with Johann Strauss, Stéphane de Tapia, Samim Akgönül, and Damien Coulon, that I was introduced to the wider horizons of Turkic studies: intellectual history, migrations, Ottoman translation movements, medieval Anatolia. These encounters opened new directions without displacing the philological core of my work; they rather helped me see how deeply language is entangled with the histories that are told through it.

My doctoral dissertation, co-supervised by Stéphane de Tapia and Damien Coulon, examines the influence of the nineteenth-century French orientalist Léon Cahun on Turkist movements and on the changing perception of the Middle Ages in Turkish historiography, from the late Ottoman period to the present. I will defend it in September 2026.

Between 2019 and 2025 I taught at the Department of Turkish Studies at the University of Strasbourg, first as adjunct lecturer, then as lecturer, and finally as Temporary Teaching and Research Fellow (ATER). I am also an associate researcher at the GEO research group (Groupe d'études orientales, slaves et néo-helléniques).

After the dissertation I plan to return to the philological core of my work, with a post-doctoral project centred on Old Turkic, the oldest attested stages of the Turkic language family. For me this is less a new departure than a return: the thread that has run through my work since Istanbul, now taken up as its own subject. Further details will be announced in due course.