The Karpat Center provides generous summer funding to PhD students in History whose research interests are within the scope of Turkish Studies. Fellows are selected and notified at the time of admission to the PhD program. Recipients of this award are encouraged to take Turkish language classes, but not required to do so.
For further information see Department of History Funding.
Karpat Center Turkish Studies Summer Fellows
Deniz Yüce, Karpat Center Turkish Studies Summer Fellow (2026–28)
My research focuses on labor history, penal modernity, and the emergence of law enforcement institutions. I specialize in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, which I approach from a comparative perspective. For my M.A. thesis, I examined the rise of obligatory labor in road construction in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, with particular attention to its legal frameworks and working conditions.
Dane Smith, Karpat Center Turkish Studies Summer Fellow (2023-25)
My research focuses on ethnicity, religious identity, race, and other conceptions of difference in Byzantium. I am particularly interested in the historical anthropology and how conceptions of human difference manifested in state and popular actions. On the side I am interested in how the European Middle Ages are depicted in modern media and the use of history by political actors.
Berke Çetinkaya, Karpat Center Turkish Studies Summer Fellow (2024-26)
I am a Byzantinist with broad research interests, including (but not limited to) the social, cultural, and intellectual history of Byzantium; book culture; history writing and education in the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey; reception studies; and digital history. My dissertation examines how friendship and fictive kinship shaped elite male life in the Middle Byzantine Empire (867–1081). I also pursue a side project on the teaching and learning of Byzantine history in the late Ottoman and Republican eras, with particular attention to Istanbul. In addition, I research and publish on the posthumous, predominantly modern and contemporary, reception and appropriation of Byzantium.