I am an economic and social historian working on the political economies of large-scale mineral extraction in the early modern Ottoman Empire, particularly the production of saltpeter and sulfur for gunpowder and silver for coinage in the empire’s semi-arid regions of Central Anatolia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Currently a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA’s Center for the 17th and 18th Century Studies and the Clark Library, I obtained my Ph.D. in History at Brown University in 2025. I was an ARIT-fellow in Summer 2022 and an ANAMED fellow in the 2022-23 academic year.

I completed my undergraduate studies in Economics and History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, where I also earned my master’s degree in History.

I have been an active and regular contributor to member-run academic initiatives on political economy and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and global early modern mining. I have also organized and chaired academic panels at international conferences on the histories of capitalism, environment, and labor, within and beyond the Ottoman world.

Alongside my academic publications, I occasionally translate books and articles on social theory, historical materialism, and eco-socialism. I have also co-organized successful curriculum change campaigns at my alma mater in the early 2010s, which increased pluralism in course offerings, and participated in international initiatives such as Rethinking Economics and the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics.

(Photo: Demirkazık, Aladağlar 2023,
Niğde, one of the high-altitude sites of silver and lead extraction, was a resource frontier in the late eighteenth century)