Merve Tekgürler

My dissertation research focuses on the long eighteenth-century Ottoman-Polish borderlands north of the Danube River. I study news and information networks in the borderland and the impact of the Russian and Austrian expansions, particularly from 1760s onwards, on Ottoman imperial practices and actionable and scientific knowledge production within the administration milieu. Ottoman court histories, written by actors within the scribal bureaucracy, are one of the sources in which I analyse the changes and continuities in imperial practices. For my CESTA fellowship project, I bring together multiple transcribed and machine-readable histories in Ottoman Turkish from roughly 1700 to 1850s in one corpus to investigate historiographical narrative strategies, historians’ positionalities on contemporary political events and how they reflect on the pressures posed by the Russian expansionist policy.