R. Aslıhan Aksoy-sheridan

Biography

R. Aslıhan Aksoy-Sheridan graduated from BoÄŸaziçi University’s Department of Western Languages and Literatures with high honors in 2000, receiving her M.A. from the same department in 2003 with her thesis “The Embowelled Brain: The Carnivalesque in the Works of Jonathan Swift and Flann O’Brien”. Aksoy-Sheridan served as the founding research asistant at the BoÄŸaziçi University Mithat Alam Film Center between 2000 and 2003. She received her second M.A. in Turkish Literature in 2009, from Bilkent University, with her thesis “Textual Ambivalence in the Narratives of Ahmet Mithat Efendi”. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. in Ottoman history at the same university’s Department of History with her dissertation “A Study of Pseudo-Historical Ottoman Narratives of the 17th–18th Centuries: Envisioning an Imperial Past and Future in the Ottoman Social Imagination and Memory”, which used Ottoman miscellaneous manuscripts to investigate early modern communal conceptions of history as propagated in the Ottoman Empire. In 2012–2013, she received a residential junior fellowship from Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC), where she conducted extensive archival research on the 17th-century Ottoman miscellanies held in the Süleymaniye manuscript library. She worked as a part-time instructor of Turkish modern history and language at Bilkent University's Department of History and the Turkish Unit between 2015 and 2017. Since 2014 she has been teaching Ottoman Turkish at intermediate and advanced levels at the Ankara branch of the Tarih Vakfı (History Foundation).

Research Interest

Her interests focus primarily on the intellectual and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire, particularly miscellanies and forms of literacy and cultural consumption in the early modern period.