Dr. A. Ebru Akcasu (Anglo-American University Prague)

Stifled by Modernity: Ottoman Women’s Activism from Empire to Republic

Fatih Rüşdiyesi’nin kız öğrencileri / Abdullah Frères, photographes de S.M.I. le Sultan. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection, LC-USZ62-80807.

Dr. A. Ebru Akcasu is a historian of the Modern Middle East specializing in the Ottomans’ engagement with modernity at the end of empire. Much of her current research rests at the intersection of gender, confession, identity, and modernity, and examines transnational flows of individuals and ideas. Ebru Akcasu holds a B.A. (SJSU) and two M.A.s (SFSU and SOAS) in History, and a Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies (SOAS). Since completing her Ph.D. in 2017, she has taught at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, and Charles and Anglo-American universities in Prague.

Ebru Akcasu’s research while a fellow at the Orient-Institut Istanbul concentrates on women’s activism and visibility from the late Hamidian Era through the early years of the Turkish Republic. To this end, she is working on a project that deliberates on the socio-political reasons and implications of the historiographical neglect of women activists in this transformative period. The topic is approached through a biographical and historiographical study of Emine Semiye, who has only recently started to emerge in the literature as a key figure in the late Ottoman women’s movement. Ebru’s project will build on works published in Turkish on Emine Semiye and weave her story more prominently into debates on contemporary assumptions and historical realities of the complexity of the late Ottoman women’s movement. In its aim to help reintegrate lost voices into echoes of an Ottoman past, this project will deliberate on how to negotiate historiographical voids with existing narratives about gender in this transformative period. The article that this research will produce will be part of a biographically focused special issue Ebru Akcasu is co-editing for the journal Archiv Orientální (ArOr).

Besides her work on Emine Semiye, Ebru Akcasu is additionally finalizing a translation of a text on gendered duties to the homeland in the second constitutional era and carrying out research on her monograph on migration in the late Ottoman Empire.

22./23.5.2023 Workshop: Imperial Lives Turned National: Biographical Reflections of the Post-Ottoman Transformation a Century ago. Orient-Institut Istanbul.