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 — a formative period that 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.

Alongside my doctoral work I teach Turkish language, Ottoman Turkish, and the history of Turkic languages in the Department of Turkish Studies at the University of Strasbourg. I am also an associate researcher at the GEO research group (Groupe d'études orientales, slaves et néo-helléniques).

I am currently preparing a post-doctoral project on Old Turkic — the oldest attested stages of the language and the manuscript and epigraphic cultures in which they have come down to us. 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.