Postdoctoral Research Associate
Faculty of Music & Darwin College
Cambridge Digital Humanities Associate
email: oe239@cam.ac.uk
Biography
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Faculty of Music, working on an ERC Starting Grant funded by the UKRI, titled "Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media, and Power, 1789-1914." I earned my PhD in Art History from Koç University in Istanbul. My book project, Echoes over the Bosphorus: An Auditory History of Late Ottoman Istanbul (1826-1923), focuses on three sounding devices—church bells, cannons, and talking machines—as organizing principles to offer an auditory examination of Late Ottoman Istanbul’s modernization from the perspectives of sound, hearing, and listening. I also employ computational methodologies (digital cartography, textual analysis, network theory, sentiment analysis) to investigate Ottoman discographies and the ideas of noise in the Ottoman Empire.
Research
- Sound Studies
- Digital Humanities
- Ottoman History
- Auditory History
Publications
TBA 2025 Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer): A Quantitative Textual Analysis of Travelers' Accounts in Late Ottoman Istanbul
TBA 2025 Journal of Musicology (University of California Press): “A Scientific Oddity:” Talking Machines of Late Ottoman Istanbul
Digital Story Map: Echoes over the Bosphorus
echoesoverthebosphorus.com
Digital Sound Collection
Sounds of The RMK Museum: Echoes of an Industrial Legacy (Koç University Library)
librarydigitalcollections.ku.edu.tr/en/collection/sounds-of-rahmi-koc-museum/?detail=SRKM-CollectionGuide
Conferences
11 December 2024 King’s College London - Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum
Church Bell-Related Conflicts in the Late Ottoman Empire
11 October 2024 Humboldt University of Berlin - Mus.A Symposium
Ottoman Discographies: Sonic Representations of Cultural Exchange
13 July 2024 University of Cambridge - The Politics of Giving
Cannons as Diplomatic Objects of Gift-Giving in the Ottoman Empire
25-26 March 2024 Inalco, Paris - From the Grand Tour to Orient Express
“Noisy Constantinople:” Auditory Perceptions of European Travelers
15 February 2024 Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin - Sound, Text, and Context
An Auditory Take on Church Bells in the Ottoman Antique Weapons’ Display
1 December 2023 University of Cambridge - Middle East Music Forum
The Cultural Impact of the Early Phonographs in the Ottoman Empire
23 November 2023 FernUniversität, Frankfurt - Digital Hermeneutics
A Quantitative Textual Analysis of Travelers’ Accounts in Late Ottoman Istanbul
6–9 July 2023 Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines, Caen - RSVP 2023.
From Illustration to Photography: Late Ottoman Istanbul in the ILN (1842-1922)
22–23 June 2023 King’s College, London - Sounding Modernism
The Cannon Shots of Late Ottoman Istanbul
18 December 2022 Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Virtual
Sleeping Angels on Domes: The Church Bells of the Late Ottoman Empire
30 May 2022 Orient-Institut Istanbul - Experience of a City
“A Scientific Oddity:” Talking Machines of Late Ottoman Istanbul
