I am a political scientist working at the intersection of political theory, the history of political thought, and international relations. My research examines how political power is conceptualized, justified, and contested across different historical and institutional contexts.

My work is shaped by a sustained interest in the historical life of political concepts. I study how ideas of legitimacy, sovereignty, and public sphere acquire meaning within specific political languages, and how they contribute to the formation of political order, statehood, and collective self-understanding.

My earlier research focused on Islamic and Ottoman advice literature and the vocabularies of legitimacy in medieval and early modern political thought. Building on this historical background, my current work turns more directly toward the modern period, in closer alignment with my broader formation in political science and international relations. I now examine questions of state authority, sovereignty, and political identity and ideologies in modern political life and foreign policy.

Turkish political life and foreign policy provide an important historical and conceptual ground for this inquiry. I approach Turkey not merely as a case, but as a site through which wider questions about modern statehood, authority, and international order can be reconsidered.

My methodological orientation combines linguistic contextualism, conceptual history, and interpretive political analysis. I welcome scholarly exchange and collaboration with researchers working on political theory, international relations theory, conceptual history, Turkish politics, and history of political thought.

My academic formation began in the Department of Political Science at Galatasaray University, where I developed my first sustained interest in modern political thought and political theory. During my undergraduate studies, I also spent a period as an exchange student at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The courses I took there on Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault played a decisive role in shaping my decision to focus on modern political thought and the theoretical foundations of politics.

This orientation was further developed in my undergraduate thesis, titled Le démantèlement de la moralité et de la liberté: Domination de l’État sur la politique chez Arendt. While working on Arendt, I became increasingly attentive to the tension between modern and pre-modern political thought, especially around questions of freedom, morality, political action, and the expansion of state power into the political realm.

I then continued my studies at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where I pursued a master’s degree in Histoire de la pensée politique. I was awarded both the ENS Ampère Scholarship and the French Government’s Eiffel Scholarship. Although much of my coursework focused on modern political thinkers, my master’s thesis turned toward the pre-modern, even medieval, period. Under the title Gouverner la justice: La conception du gouvernement et de la justice chez Nizam al-Mulk, I examined the relationship between government, justice, and political authority in Nizam al-Mulk’s Siyasatnama. This work deepened my interest in the historical formation of political concepts and in the ways pre-modern political vocabularies organize questions of rule, order, and justice.

At ENS de Lyon, my interest in the history of political thought was also shaped by a course on Italian political thought, with particular attention to Gramsci and Machiavelli. This encounter opened a further comparative horizon for thinking about political counsel, power, and the autonomy of politics. During my doctoral studies, I spent a period at the Università degli Studi di Siena, where my engagement with Italian Renaissance political thought, particularly Machiavelli, did not become the direct object of my dissertation, but remained an important conceptual background to it. It helped me think more carefully about the transformation of advice literature, the changing relationship between morality and politics, and the emergence of politics as a relatively autonomous field of reasoning.

This intellectual trajectory led me toward linguistic contextualism, especially the insight that political concepts acquire meaning within specific argumentative, institutional, and historical contexts. Rather than treating concepts as timeless analytical categories, I became interested in how they emerge, travel, and change within historically situated political languages. In this sense, my work has increasingly come to revolve around three interrelated concerns: concepts, the historicity of concepts, and the political character of historicity itself.

I pursued this line of inquiry further in my doctoral studies in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University. Returning to the genre of advice literature, I shifted my focus from the eleventh-century Islamic political tradition to seventeenth-century Ottoman advice texts. My doctoral research, later developed into the book Eski Rejimin Meşruiyeti: 17. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Nasihatnameleri Üzerine Siyasal Bir İnceleme (Legitimacies of the Ancien Régime: A Political Inquiry into 17th-Century Ottoman Advice Literature), examined how Ottoman advice writers justified political authority in different ways. Although these texts are often grouped within the same literary and political genre, my work showed that they articulated distinct forms of legitimacy and that the social positions of their authors were closely related to the kinds of social and political order they defended.

Across these stages, my intellectual formation has been shaped by a sustained concern with the historicity of political concepts and the political conditions under which historical meanings are produced. I am interested not only in how political concepts change over time, but also in how historical experience is interpreted, narrated, and made politically meaningful. This continues to shape my work on legitimacy, sovereignty, public authority, and the historically situated languages of political order. Building on this long-range historical perspective, my current work now turns back to the modern period, in closer alignment with my broader formation in political science, to examine how questions of legitimacy, sovereignty, recognition, and state subjectivity are rearticulated in modern political life and international relations.

I currently serve as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Istanbul Nişantaşı University. Alongside my teaching and research, I contribute to departmental and faculty-level administrative work as Vice Chair of the Department, Chair of the Departmental Quality Commission, and member of the Faculty Quality Commission. As part of my departmental service, I have been actively involved in the quality assurance and accreditation process through which the department received a four-year accreditation, granted by the field-specific accreditation body (STAR) recognized by Turkish Counsil of Higher Education.

Before joining Istanbul Nişantaşı University, I taught in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Izmir University of Economics. My teaching has been primarily at the undergraduate level and reflects the main axes of my academic work: political theory, the history of political thought, comparative politics, Turkish administrative history, and political ideologies. My undergraduate teaching has been conducted in both Turkish and English; I am also qualified to teach in French.

In my teaching, I emphasize close reading, conceptual analysis, and historical contextualization, while encouraging students to connect theoretical debates with contemporary political questions.

My current research and project work develops along three interconnected lines: political science education, political behavior, and the intellectual history of modern Turkish politics.

First, I am involved in several projects that seek to develop innovative practices in political science education. These projects focus especially on the use of games, simulations, and interactive learning environments in teaching political science. Their distinctive contribution lies in combining game design, emerging technologies, and artificial intelligence to create new pedagogical tools for political science education. Through these projects, I am interested in how political science can be taught not only as a body of knowledge, but also as a field of practice, decision-making, and critical reasoning.

Second, I am part of a research project examining the effects of international political crises on voter behavior. This project reflects my broader interest in the relationship between domestic political perception and international developments, and in the ways foreign policy events may shape political attitudes, electoral preferences, and public responses.

Alongside these ongoing project roles, my current individual research increasingly turns toward the 1960 constitution-making process in Turkey. I focus in particular on the intellectual worlds of jurists involved in this process, asking how legal doctrines changed over time and what political, institutional, and intellectual factors shaped these transformations. Rather than treating constitutional debates only as legal-technical discussions, I approach them as sites where competing visions of political order, authority, statehood, and democracy were articulated.

In parallel with this work, I am also developing research on the simultaneous presence of multiple “Kemalisms” in Turkish political life. This line of inquiry examines how Kemalism has functioned not as a single, fixed doctrine, but as a contested and historically variable political language through which different actors have imagined the state, society, modernization, secularism, and legitimacy.

Finally, I am currently involved in an editorial project on the agendas and actors of contemporary philosophy in Turkey. This project complements my broader interest in the circulation of ideas, intellectual fields, and the institutional conditions under which philosophical and political thought take shape.

Taken together, these projects reflect my broader concern with the ways political concepts, institutional practices, and intellectual traditions are formed, transformed, and mobilized in modern political life.

My Francophone academic formation has also shaped my engagement with the publishing world in Turkey. One of the advantages of moving across Turkish and French intellectual contexts has been the opportunity to work not only as a scholar, but also as a translator, editor, and reader within different areas of publishing.

I entered the publishing world as a translator during my first year as an undergraduate student, when I began working with Ayrıntı Yayınları. I later prepared reader reports for Doğan Kitap and wrote book reviews for literary supplements. For a considerable period, I also worked for Dergâh Yayınları, where I served both as a translation editor and as a history editor.

My translation and editorial work has included projects carried out within the framework of the Ministry of Culture. I have translated a total of four books, two of which were the product of collaborative translation work.

I regard translation and editorial work not as activities separate from academic life, but as part of the broader circulation of ideas across languages, disciplines, and publics. Moving between languages requires attention not only to words, but also to intellectual traditions, historical contexts, and conceptual worlds. In this sense, my work as a translator and editor is closely connected to my academic interest in conceptual history, political language, and the historicity of political thought.

This experience has also shaped the way I think about the public and institutional life of ideas: how texts are selected, evaluated, translated, edited, circulated, and received within broader intellectual fields. My background in publishing has provided me with a valuable foundation for contributing to peer review and the editorial processes of academic journals, particularly in assessing manuscripts with attention to argument, structure, conceptual precision, style, and scholarly contribution.

In this sense, my translation and editorial work remains an important part of my academic profile. It complements my research and teaching by giving me practical experience in the mediation, evaluation, and circulation of political, historical, and philosophical texts.