Ceyda Karamürsel is a lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS, University of London. A historian of the modern Middle East, she specializes in the social, political, and legal history of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Middle East Center. Dr. Karamürsel’s research explores the practice of slavery and the complex, often elusive, meanings of freedom in the late Ottoman Empire. Her work examines how foundational concepts such as freedom and equality before the law—often taken for granted today—were understood, negotiated, and contested by Ottoman slaves, slaveholders, and the state. She is currently writing a book that situates these questions within a broader global political and legal framework. Beyond this, Dr. Karamürsel is engaged in several other research projects. One examines an international legal dispute between the Ottoman Empire and Greece over stolen personal property, using it as a lens to explore how different and seemingly conflicting legal systems interacted in shaping the evolving concept of international property rights. Another, which lays the groundwork for her second book, investigates how Ottoman notions of slavery circulated in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century, tracing the sensationalized story of an American opera singer allegedly murdered in the imperial harem in Istanbul.

“I stumbled upon the Hafız Ağa Library on a pleasant July morning, many years ago. It felt like a treasure trove—its contents just out of reach—as I looked for, in the few hours I had, for any trace of the island’s ill-fated entanglement in the Ottoman Empire’s long history of slavery. I did not know then that what I was looking for would find me years later—not in the library’s books, but through the cherished and mourned family history of its founder and namesake. I am grateful to have been entrusted with the tender story of Şemsinur, whose captivity quietly bore and bound—and still binds—many worlds together.”

Ceyda Karamürsel