The David and Catherine Cuthell Summer Research Fellowships in Turkish Studies

The David and Catherine Cuthell Summer Research Fellowships in Turkish Studies

We Are Now Accepting Applications for Summer 2025

The deadline for submission is April 5, 2025

 

The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies at Columbia University is pleased to announce its annual David and Catherine Cuthell Summer Research Fellowships for students conducting research in any area of Turkish Studies. This includes the study of Turkish-speaking peoples from ancient times to the modern era, as well as the cultures and civilizations of the former territories of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Republic of Turkey.

This fellowship is designed to defray the costs of travel and living expenses associated with conducting research in Turkey. Each fellowship carries a stipend of up to $3,000 and is intended to support library, archival, or collection research in Turkey for a minimum of one month during the summer of 2025.

Language training in Modern Turkish or Ottoman Turkish may also be supported, provided that the applicant demonstrates clear research needs for this training.

Eligibility

The fellowship is open to:

  • Undergraduates, MA students, and first- through sixth-year PhD students in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of Columbia University’s School of Arts and Sciences.
  • Applicants must be in good academic standing.

Students who have previously received a David and Catherine Cuthell Summer Fellowship may reapply, but no individual may receive this fellowship more than twice. Priority will be given to first-time applicants in cases where qualifications are equal.

Conditions
  • Fellowship funds may not be used to hire third parties to conduct on-site archival or field research on behalf of the recipient.
  • This fellowship cannot be held simultaneously with another grant awarded for the same project.

If you have been awarded another summer grant for the same project, please notify the Sakıp Sabancı Center immediately.

Application Instructions

Students interested in applying for the David and Catherine Cuthell Summer Research Fellowships must submit the following materials to [email protected]:

  1. CV
  2. Statement: A statement (up to 500 words) explaining the research project, accompanied by a one-page appendix outlining:
    • The research schedule
    • A timetable for the project’s completion
    • Planned field research activities (e.g., library, archival, or collection resources to be accessed or individuals to be interviewed)
  3. Amount Requested and Budget: A detailed budget, including the amount requested and any other funding sources, if applicable.
  4. Letter of Recommendation: Undergraduate and MA students must also submit a letter of recommendation from a faculty member.

Submission Guidelines:

  • All documents (except the letter of recommendation) should be consolidated into a single .pdf file.
  • The letter of recommendation should be sent directly by the faculty member to the email address above.

Sakıp Sabancı Center Summer Fellows

Ali Uğurlu 
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies 
Project: "For the Love of Freedom: Critique and Utopia in the Ottoman Age of Capital"

Ararat Sekeryan 
Department of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature 
Project: " Within the Contact Zone: Russian-Turkish Encounters in Occupied Istanbul and Beyond (1918-1939)"

Julia Tomasson
Department of History
Project: "Histories and Practices of Proof across Epistemic Cultures: Transmission, Translation, and Traditions of Arabic Mathematics in and between Europe and the Islamicate World"

Doha Tazi Hemida
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: "The Problem of Sovereignty in Classical Islamic Thought"

Yosra Hussein
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: "Between Sharī‘a and Ḳānūn: The Legal Administration of Ottoman Egypt and Public Perceptions of Justice"

Amir Izadpanahi
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: “The Metastasis of Namus: the Politics of Sexual Violence in Turkish Cinema”

Varol Kahveci
Department of Germanic Languages
Project: "Rethinking Heimat: The Poetics and Politics of Heimat between 19 th Century Orientalism and Contemporary Literature of Migration"

Caleb Berer
Columbia College
Project: Black Eyes for the People: Karagöz, Halkevleri, and the New World of 1933

Azat Bilalutdinov
Department of History
Project: Ottoman Language Summer Program (ANAMED, Koc University, Turkey)

Yosra Hussein
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: Metamorphosing Empires: History of Public Health Between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt (1830-1900)

Aneka Kazlyna
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: Reading the Astral Sciences and Medicine in the Archives

Nancy Ko
Department of History
Project: Intensive Ottoman and Turkish Summer School (Ottoman Studies Foundation, Cunda, Turkey)

Abdul Rahman Latif
Department of Religion
Project: Afterlives of the Primordial Prophets: Ādam and Nūḥ in the 11th through 17thCenturies.

Yasemin Akçagüner
Department of History
Project: Celestial Bodies:  Imagining the Ottoman Lifetime in the Corpora of Astral Science and Medicine (1785-1883)

Elif Irem Az
Department of Anthropology
Project: The Disaster is (Not) Over: Coal, Labor and Life in the Soma Province, Turkey

Bailey Barnard
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Project: Royal Posturing: Staging the Hellenisti Ruler in Portraits and in Person

Azat Bilalutdinov
Department of History
Project: activity of consuls as powerful agents of the Russian imperial policy in the Balkans and Anatolia (1856-1914)

Alaa Aly El-Shafei
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: Genealogies of Punishment in the Middle East: Prisons, Debt, and Labor in Late Ottoman Egypt, 1805-1882

Nada Khalifa
Department of History
Project: Fact-finding Missions and the Politics of Evidence in Egypt and Bilad al-Shām (1908-1923)

Nancy Ko
Department of History
Project: Nested Nostalgias: Violence and the Making of “Oriental” Jewish Identify Politics

Yasemin Akçagüner
Department of History
Project: The relationship between changing notions of “time” and “science” in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire

Erik Blackthorne-O'Barr
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: The effects of cultural alienation and linguistic homogenization in the 20th century Turkish Republic and Pahlavi Iran.

Nancy Ko
Department of History
Project: Ottoman Omissions: Jewish Belonging and the Politics of Nostalgia in the Post-Tanzimat Middle East

Ararat Şekeryan
Department of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature
Project: Iraida Barry and the Russian Moment of Istanbul

Deborah Sokolowski
Department of Classical Studies
Project: Culture and Countryside in Roman Bithynia

Erhan Tamur
​​​​​​​Department of Art History and Archaeology
​​​​​​​Project: Site-Worlds: An Account of Material Lives from Tello (ancient Girsu)

Zeinab Azarbadegan
Department of History
Project: Bloodless Battles: Contested Sovereignty and Citizenship between the Ottoman, Iranian Qajar, and British Empires in Nineteenth Ottoman Iraq

Sahar Mor Bostock
Department of History
Project: History of Technology and Infrastructure in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire During the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries

Matthew Ghazarian
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: Famine and Sectarianism in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-94

Aseel Najib
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: The Relationship between Politics and Law in the Early Abbasid Period through a Study of Land Taxation

Orçun Can Okan
Department of History
Project: Coping with Transitions: The Connected Construction of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq (1918-28)

Ali Uğurlu
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: Intellectual and Social History of the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey - the Emergence of the Secular Read through the Prism of Capitalization 

Marlow Davis
Department of Slavic Languages
Project: The legacy of White Russian emigration to Turkey following the First World War and Russian Revolution, with a focus on Iraida Barry

Ayşe Ercan
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Project: Fashioning a Medieval Capital: The Topography and Archaeology of the Mangana Quarter in Constantinople (843-1453 C.E.)

Matthew Gillman
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Project: Medieval Glass and the Aesthetics of Simulation

Selim Karlıtekın
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: Caliphate Trouble in Sovereignty’s Empire: Population, Representation and Religious Difference in Ottoman Empire, 1821-1914

Henny Ziai
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Project: The Politics of Taxation and Debt:Sudan under the ‘Turkiyya’