Merve Tekgürler

Merve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. In AY 2023-24, they hold the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Merve has a BA in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford.

Merve's dissertation, tentatively titled "Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities," focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s–1820s), examining change and continuity north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on the production and mobilisation of imperial knowledge.

As part of their dissertation project, Merve is training a handwritten text recognition model for 18th-century Ottoman Turkish administrative hand and developing AI-based natural language processing tools for Ottoman Turkish. Their aim is to compile a large machine-readable corpus of manuscript news communiqués and employ computational text analysis methods. In AY 2022-23, they were a Digital Humanities Graduate Fellow at CESTA with their project on topic modeling in Ottoman court histories.

Merve's research on the borderlands ties to their passion for maps and spatial humanities. They are the co-PI of Cistern: A Database of Geographical Knowledge in the Ottoman World and contributed to Mapping Ottoman Epirus, including a 3D model of the late-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire.

Previously, Merve was a G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23) and graduate coordinator of the Stanford Humanities Center Eurasian Empires Workshop. They also served as senior graduate mentor for the Undergraduate Research Internship at CESTA. Outside academia, Merve enjoys playing tennis, doing gymnastics, and all kinds of DIY projects.