Director
Dr. Kate Fleet
Dr. Kate Fleet was educated at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where she did her B.A. in Middle Eastern History and Arabic and her Ph.D. on the commercial relations between the Turks and the Genoese 1300-1453. She was appointed to the Skilliter Centre in 1991 and became Director in 2000. She is Postgraduate Tutor at Newnham College where she is a Fellow.
Kate Fleet has taught Ottoman history at SOAS, and Ottoman history, Middle Eastern history, modern Turkish history and Ottoman and modern Turkish at Cambridge, where she was the Newton Trust Lecturer in Ottoman History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the History Faculty from 2001 to 2011. She was Co-Editor of Eurasian Studies from 2002 to 2006, Editor-in-Chief of Turkish Historical Review from 2008-2018 and has been an Executive Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three since 2012.
Her current research interests include the ways in which non-Muslim merchants operated in the Ottoman empire and late Ottoman/early Republican social and diplomatic history.
Her books include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-authored with Ebru Boyar; and Ottoman Economic Practices in Periods of Transformation: The Cases of Crete and Bulgaria (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), co-authored with Svetla Ianeva. She is editor of volume I of The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium-Turkey, 1071-1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and, together with Suraiya Faroqhi, of volume II, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
She has also edited various volumes together with Ebru Boyar: Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Middle Eastern and North African Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019); Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia (Brill: Leiden, 2021); and Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
Recent publications include “The absence of the Ottoman empire in European historiography”, in Imagined, Embodied and Actual Turks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Bent Holm and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag 2020), pp. 27-46; “A shared world of economic knowledge: the Ottoman empire and Europe in the early modern era”, in Les ottomans et l’histoire du monde, ed. Elisabetta Borromeo, Frédéric Hitzel and Benjamin Lellouch (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), pp. 627-42; “Ottoman commercial history”, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); “Taxation in the early Ottoman state, fourteenth to sixteenth centuries”, in The Routledge Handbook of Public Taxation in Medieval Europe, ed. Denis Manjot, Mathieu Caesar, Florent Garnier and Pere Verdés Pijun (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 419-26; and, with Ebru Boyar, “‘Great Britain and a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/6 (2021), 904-19, republished in From Enemies to Allies Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960, ed. Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas and William Hale (London: Routledge, 2023).
Academic Advisor
Professor Ebru Boyar
Professor Ebru Boyar studied international relations at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, specialising for her M.Sc. on the development of national identity in Algeria. She then did a Ph.D. in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, on late Ottoman and early Republican representations of the Balkans. She is Professor in and was chair of the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, where she teaches world history, Ottoman, Turkish and modern Middle Eastern history.
Her current research focuses on Ottoman and Turkish republican social history, with a particular emphasis on the social history of health in the Ottoman and early Turkish republican periods and on the concept of social disorder in the Ottoman empire. She is also interested in Ottoman and Turkish foreign relations from a social history perspective, in particular, in the personal relations between the Ottoman/Turkish and British elite in the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican period, and Ottoman-Safavid relations of the sixteenth century from the perspective of Ottoman propaganda.
Her books include Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) and, together with Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which has been translated into Chinese and Turkish. She recently edited various volumes together with Kate Fleet: Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Middle Eastern and North African Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019); Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia (Brill: Leiden, 2021); and Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
Her recent publications include “Nations and nationalisms in the late Ottoman Empire”, in The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Volume II Nationalism’s Fields of Interaction, ed. Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria and Aviel Roshwald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 24-42; “The draw of the lottery: Piyango, profit and politics in early twentieth-century İzmir”, in Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 175-205; “The late Ottoman brothel in Istanbul: heterosexual social space for homosocial entertainment?”, in Entertainment among the Ottomans, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 160-82; “Yüzellilikler: the League of Nations’s first and only Muslim refugees”, in Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period, eds. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 105-40 and with Kate Fleet, “Great Britain and ‘a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/6 (2021), 904-19, republished in From Enemies to Allies Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960, ed. Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas and William Hale (London: Routledge, 2023).
For a full publication list, see https://ir.metu.edu.tr/tr/ebru-boyar and https://metu.academia.edu/EbruBoyar.
Librarian
Eve Lacey
Eve Lacey is Librarian of the Skilliter Centre Research Library & Archives and Librarian of Newnham College Library. She is a Chartered Member of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). She studied English at the University of Cambridge, and Library and Information Studies at University College London, where she was awarded the Mary Piggot Prize for cataloguing and classification, the Sir John Macalister Medal for the most distinguished candidate on the MA, and the CILIP Student Prize for exceptional achievement in the field.
Eve contributed to a chapter on Newnham Library’s early history in Walking on the Grass, Dancing in the Corridors : Newnham at 150 (ed. Gill Sutherland and Kate Williams; Profile Editions, 2021) and won the Persephone Essay Prize for her work on a Newnham’s special collection from the Persephone Press (later published in Katherine Mansfield and Psychology, ed. Clare Hanson and Gerri Kimber; Edinburgh University Press, 2016). In 2021, she delivered the Jack Mills lecture on classification (inspired by her dissertation, “Aliens in the library: the classification of migration”, Knowledge Organization 45.5 (2018): 358-79) and co-authored a chapter on “Cataloguing, Classification, and Critical Librarianship at Cambridge University”, in Narrative Expansions (ed. Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt; Facet Publishing, 2021).
Eve Lacey has written about the Eckstein Albums and delivered a presentation on this digitised archive collection to the Anglo-Turkish Society. She coordinates the Ottomans Online seminars and Gems on Shelves series and contributes translations of Turkish entries to the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three. She is interested in Turkish library history (“The role of Halkevi libraries in the early Turkish Republic”, Library & Information History 39.2 (2023): 92–109) and is currently researching the relationship between the British Council and the Londra Türk Halkevi in the 1940s.
Conservation Advisor
Kristine Rose-Beers
Kristine Rose-Beers ACR is Head of Conservation & Heritage for Cambridge University Libraries, and an accredited member of the Institute of Conservation (ICON). She has more than 20 years of experience in manuscript conservation.
Kristine graduated from the Conservation programme at Camberwell College of Arts, London in 2002 before beginning work at Cambridge University Library, where her fascination with Islamic manuscript material was cemented. In 2008 Kristine moved to Ireland to work at the Chester Beatty as book conservator for the Turkish collection, and in 2011 she was appointed Assistant Keeper (Conservator of Manuscripts and Printed Books) at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. After four years in Cambridge, Kristine’s passion for the unique Chester Beatty collections brought her back to Dublin where she worked as the Head of Conservation until 2023.
Kristine is an active figure in the field of Islamic and Western manuscript conservation. Her research interests include the conservation of Islamic manuscript material, early binding structures and their relevance to contemporary conservation, and the use of pigments and dyes in medieval manuscripts. She has extensive first-hand experience of the complexities of conserving a wide range of bound manuscript material, as well as pigmented surfaces on both paper and parchment. Her approach is based on her understanding of materials and technologies gained through historical reconstructions as well as academic studies.
Based on her previous work, Kristine has collaborated with several significant research projects, including the TIF-DAK conservation project at the National Library of Egypt, and MINIARE at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She has presented research findings at international conferences and published articles in peer-reviewed editions, including ‘Islamic Bookbinding,’ ‘Materials,’ and ‘Conservation of media,’ in The Conservation of Books, 2023; ‘An Inspiration for Conservation: An Historic Andalusi Binding Structure,’ 2016; and ‘Conservation of the Turkish Collection at the Chester Beatty Library: A new study of Turkish book construction,’ 2010.
Kristine has taught and lectured internationally and is a regular tutor at the Montefiascone Project in Italy. She is also a member of the Institute of Conservator-Restorers in Ireland (ICRI) and the Kairouan Manuscript Project (KMP).
Postgraduate Researchers
Yuxuan Cai
Yuxuan Cai is a second-year PhD student in History at St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. Her research interests focus on the post-Byzantine / early Ottoman southern Balkans and the early modern Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. Her PhD thesis, under Dr. Kate Fleet’s supervision, addresses the transformation of Ottoman Thessaly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Before studying at Cambridge, she earned her MA in History at Georgetown University in 2021. She completed a master thesis entitled ‘Writing History in an Empire-to-be: Fifteenth- and Early-sixteenth-century Ottoman Historical Accounts on the Family of Turahanoğlu’, supervised by Professor Gábor Ágoston. It examines the transformation of the image of marcher lords in Ottoman narratives, which were increasingly used as a means to craft an imperial image of the Ottoman polity and sultanic supremacy.
Yuxuan also works on academic translation. She has translated The Imperial Harem (Pierce, Leslie. 1993) and Empress of the East (Pierce, Leslie. 2017) into Chinese. The ongoing projects are the Chinese versions of The Last Muslim Conquest (Ágoston, Gábor. 2021) and The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger.
Mehmet Doğar
Mehmet Doğar studied at the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara. His Master’s thesis, supervised by Professor Ebru Boyar, was on Turkish-Italian diplomatic relations between 1932 and 1939, with a specific focus on the Turkish perception and portrayal of the Italian threat. He is now doing a Ph.D. in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, where he is generously funded by a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. For his dissertation, under the supervision of Dr Kate Fleet, he is working on bilateral relations between Turkey and Italy in the interwar period from a socioeconomic history perspective.
His research interests include the socio-economic history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic and Turkish foreign policy in the interwar period (specifically relations with Italy and Britain). He is also interested in Italian foreign policy and imperialism in the early twentieth century, the workings of fascist Italian economic policy on the ground, and the diplomatic history of interwar Europe and the Mediterranean in general. He supervises students on twentieth century European and global history.
He previously published an article on the state-press relationship in the early Turkish Republic, examining the role of the Turkish press during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia 1935-36: “‘Complete Neutrality’ or ‘Controlled Enmity’? The Role of the Turkish Press during the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36”, Turkish Historical Review, 10 (2-3) (2019), pp. 213-51. His recent article, “The Place of Italy in Turkish Foreign Policy in the 1930s”, Middle Eastern Studies, 58 (1) (2022), pp. 48-69, examines the nature of bilateral relations between Turkey and Italy in the 1930s and challenges the widely accepted axiom that the Italian threat dominated the formation of Turkish foreign policy in this period.
Gabrielle Russo
Gabrielle is a third-year PhD student in ninth-century Arabic literature at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Gabrielle’s research centres on the construction of praise writing for the Turkic military, with particular attention to al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistle The Merits of the Turks and the poetry of al-Buḥturī.
Prior to studying at Cambridge, Gabrielle received an MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford and completed a thesis entitled ‘“The world you saw was real,” Reader: Approaching the Formalisation of the Everyday in Nâzım Hikmet’s “Rubailer” through Ibn Ḥajar’s Maqāṭīʿ.’ This project investigated the potential of transhistorical comparison to develop thought on Hikmet’s Turkish poetry through dialogue with fourteenth/fifteenth-century Arabic poetry.
Elif Yumru
After completing her undergraduate degree at Koç University in Istanbul, double majoring in History and Archaeology & Art History, Elif Yumru pursued a Master’s in the History department at Sciences Po Paris where she received the René Seydoux Scholarship. Her master’s thesis focused on the theme of public image through the case study of a nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian female figure, Princess Nazlı Fazıl (1856/7-1913). It aimed to understand how and why Princess Nazlı became a political actor and a public figure in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman, British, and French presses.
She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Cambridge International and Newnham College Scholarship. Her research at Cambridge, which is supervised by Dr. Kate Fleet, focuses on Ottoman women during and in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. She examines the changes in how women were perceived in society, their involvement in politics, the apprehension that arose in Ottoman society regarding their evolving roles, and the aspects of women’s lives that remained unchanged despite the Revolution.
Her research interests include the history of Ottoman women, the political, cultural, and social relations between the Ottoman Empire, France, and the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the history of the press and propaganda in the Ottoman Empire. Her article on Princess’s Nazlı Fazıl’s 1899 interview in a British women’s journal The Gentlewoman has been published in Middle Eastern Studies: ‘“An Oriental Gentlewoman”: Princess Nazlı Fazıl’s Interview in The Gentlewoman in 1899’. Middle Eastern Studies, 8 September 2023, 1–13.