Özgül Özdemir

Having worked on the life stories of enslaved Africans in the Ottoman Empire for her MA at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Özgül came to African history determined to study slavery on the often- overlooked intersection of Ottoman and sub-Saharan history. At Stanford, her research interests extended to encompass the consequences of Ottoman presence in East Africa on the brink of colonialism. Özgül's work on the Transnational, International, Global History track in the history department, supervised by Professor Richard Roberts and Professor Ali Yaycıoğlu, uses mainly the Ottoman archives and aims to bridge the fields of Ottoman and African studies.