Yasemin Akcaguner

Yasemin Akçagüner is a doctoral candidate in the History department and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia. She studies the relationship between scientific knowledge production and social order in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. Her dissertation is a history of the transformation of Ottoman medicine, with a focus on the social and material challenges Ottoman Turkish, Greek and Armenian physicians and artisans faced in the translation, adaptation, reproduction and implementation of biomedical ideas. Through the life and works of a physician-turned-court historian, Şanizade Ataullah Efendi (d. 1826), her work explores how changing conceptions of the human body shaped imaginations of the body politic in the Ottoman age of revolutions. 

Originally from Istanbul, Yasemin holds an MSc with Distinction from the International History department of the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science and Asian & Middle Eastern Cultures with Distinction from Barnard College. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Hazine,  The Metropole blog and the Scientific Instrument Society blog.