I am a political scientist whose work lies at the intersection of political theory, the history of political thought, and international relations. My research examines how political power is conceptualized, justified, and contested across different historical, intellectual, and institutional settings.

At the center of my work is an interest in the historical life of political concepts. I study how notions such as legitimacy, sovereignty, and the public sphere acquire meaning within particular political languages, and how they contribute to the formation of political order, the state, and collective forms of self-understanding.

My earlier research focused on Islamic and Ottoman advice literature and on vocabularies of legitimacy in premodern political thought. Building on this historical foundation, my current work examines modern forms of state authority and sovereignty in domestic politics and international relations.

Turkey provides a privileged historical and conceptual terrain for this inquiry. Rather than treating it simply as an empirical case, I approach it as a site from which to reconsider broader questions concerning the modern state, political authority, and international order.

Methodologically, my work brings together linguistic contextualism, conceptual history, and interpretive political analysis. I welcome scholarly exchange and collaboration in political theory, international relations theory, conceptual history, Turkish politics, and the history of political thought.

My training in political science began at Galatasaray University, where I developed a sustained interest in political theory and the history of modern political thought. During my undergraduate studies, an exchange period at the Université du Québec à Montréal allowed me to deepen my engagement with Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault. From this period onward, my work has been animated by a central question: how is political authority constituted and justified, and how does it transform the conditions of collective freedom?

This question first took shape in my undergraduate thesis, The Dismantlement of Freedom and Morality: State Domination on Political Sphere in Arendt. Drawing on Arendt’s distinction between political action and domination, I examined how the expansion of state power can erode the conditions of political freedom and responsibility. This project marked the beginning of a broader inquiry into the historical forms through which political power is legitimized and contested.

I pursued this inquiry at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where I completed a master’s degree in History of Political Thought with the support of the Ampère Excellence Scholarship and the French government’s Eiffel Scholarship. My master’s thesis, Governing Justice: Conceptions of Government and Justice in Nizam al-Mulk, turned to a premodern corpus centered on the Siyasatnama. This shift did not represent a departure from my earlier concerns; rather, it allowed me to historicize them by examining how authority and government were understood and justified within a political language organized around justice and order.

My interest in Italian political thought, cultivated at the ENS de Lyon and subsequently developed during a doctoral research stay at the Università degli Studi di Siena, also played an important role in this trajectory. In particular, my engagement with Machiavelli sharpened my thinking about advice literature, the reconfiguration of the relationship between morality and politics, and the emergence of the political as a relatively autonomous domain of reasoning.

Engagement with these different corpora gradually led me to linguistic contextualism. This approach treats political concepts not as timeless analytical categories, but as situated interventions within specific historical, argumentative, and institutional contexts. It informs my analysis of the circulation and transformation of vocabularies of legitimacy, authority, and political order.

My doctoral research, conducted in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University, marked the culmination of this first stage of my intellectual trajectory. Focusing on seventeenth-century Ottoman advice texts, it was subsequently published as Eski Rejimin Meşruiyeti: 17. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Nasihatnameleri Üzerine Siyasal Bir İnceleme (The Legitimacies of the Ancien Régime: A Political Study of Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Advice Treatises). I argue that texts often grouped together as a single literary and political genre in fact articulate distinct conceptions of legitimacy and social order, closely connected to the social positions of their authors.

This historical training continues to shape my current research on modern and contemporary politics and international relations. As my work turns to questions of sovereignty, recognition, state authority, and political subjectivity, it remains guided by the same underlying inquiry: how are forms of political power historically produced, legitimized, and contested through particular languages and institutions?

I am currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Istanbul Nişantaşı University. Previously, I taught in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Izmir University of Economics. My undergraduate teaching includes political theory, the history of political thought, comparative politics, Turkish administrative history, and political ideologies. I have taught in Turkish and English, and I am also able to teach in French.

My teaching centers on the close reading of texts, conceptual analysis, and historical contextualization. I encourage students to use these tools to place contemporary political controversies in perspective and to develop rigorous arguments of their own.

Alongside my teaching and research, I serve as Deputy Head of the Department, Coordinator of the Departmental Quality Commission, and a member of the Faculty Quality Commission. In these capacities, I contributed to the quality assurance and accreditation process through which the department received a four-year accreditation from STAR, a disciplinary accreditation body recognized by Türkiye’s Council of Higher Education.

My current research centers on the intellectual and constitutional history of modern Turkey. I examine how notions of legitimacy, democracy, and constitutional order have been mobilized to define, justify, and contest state authority in modern Turkish political life. Alongside this individual research agenda, I contribute to collaborative projects on electoral behavior, innovation in political science pedagogy, and contemporary intellectual life in Turkey.

One strand of my individual research examines the constitution-making process initiated in 1960 and culminating in the adoption of Turkey’s 1961 Constitution. I focus on the jurists involved in this process, their intellectual worlds, and the evolution of their doctrines. Rather than treating constitutional debates as merely juridical or technical discussions, I analyze them as sites in which competing conceptions of the state, democracy, public authority, and political order were articulated.

A second, closely related strand explores the multiple forms of Kemalism in Turkish political life. Rather than treating Kemalism as a single, immutable doctrine, I examine it as a contested and historically reconfigured political language through which different actors have imagined the state, society, modernization, secularism, and legitimacy.

Taken together, these two projects address a common question through distinct bodies of material: how have the state, democracy, and legitimacy been redefined and contested in modern Turkey? The first approaches this question through constitutional debates and the intellectual trajectories of jurists; the second through competing appropriations of a central ideological language in Turkish political life.

I also participate in a collaborative research project on the effects of international political crises on electoral behavior. This project investigates how foreign-policy events may reshape domestic political perceptions, public attitudes, and electoral preferences.

A further group of projects concerns innovation in the teaching of political science. These projects explore game-based learning, simulations, and interactive learning environments, including the use of digital tools and artificial intelligence. Their aim is to develop forms of teaching in which students not only acquire knowledge about politics, but also practice decision-making, argumentation, and critical judgment.

Finally, I contribute to an editorial project on the actors and intellectual agendas of contemporary philosophy in Turkey. This project extends my interest in the circulation of ideas and in the institutional settings within which philosophical and political fields take shape.

Taken together, these research projects and collaborations are united by a common concern: to understand how concepts, institutions, and intellectual traditions acquire meaning, undergo transformation, and are mobilized in modern political life.

My editorial work has developed alongside my academic training and research. Rooted in a trajectory between Turkish and Francophone intellectual worlds, it has involved work as a translator, editorial reader, and editor—activities I understand as forms of mediation between texts, intellectual traditions, and their publics.

I began translating during my first year as an undergraduate through a collaboration with Ayrıntı Publishing. I subsequently prepared readers’ reports for Doğan Books and published book reviews in literary supplements. A substantial part of my editorial experience took place at Dergâh Publishing, where I worked on translations and works of history.

I have translated four books, two of them in collaboration with other translators. These include the Turkish translation of the second volume of Albert Gabriel’s Monuments turcs d’Anatolie, devoted to Amasya, Tokat, and Sivas, published in Turkish as Anadolu’daki Türk Anıtları II: Amasya – Tokat – Sivas within a project of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey. My translations are listed on the Translations page.

For me, translation and editing are not peripheral to research. They demand close attention to the uses of concepts, historical contexts, intellectual traditions, and the conditions under which texts circulate. This experience complements my research and teaching while sharpening my attention to argument, conceptual coherence, and the craft of scholarly writing.