Ali M. Ugurlu

I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. My work explores the relationship between political concepts and social practices in capitalist modernity. My dissertation, titled “The Antinomies of Freedom: Crisis, Critique, and Utopia in the Ottoman Age of Capital,” is an intellectual history of freedom in Ottoman-Turkish and Arab social thought between the 1860s and the 1920s, with a focus on intellectuals that were active in four critical political conjunctures: The declaration of the First Ottoman Constitution (1876); the founding of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (1882); the Second Constitutional Revolution (1908); and the dissolution of the empire (ca. 1922). I argue that the social world in which Ottoman intellectuals envisaged new concepts of freedom inhered a systemic contradiction: that to be free in the age of Ottoman capital entailed specific forms of unfreedom. By honing on the conditions of possibility of this conceptual grammar between Ottoman-Turkish and Arab intellectual production, the dissertation also challenges the notion of the nineteenth century as one of latent national awakening, and instead explores the nature of the social problems to which nationalism became a timely answer.

I received a BA from Rutgers University in 2012 and an MA from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2017. My dissertation research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission.