About
My interest in Turkish philology took shape in high school and led me to the Faculty of Letters at the University of Istanbul, where I studied Turkish Language and Literature. That formative period remains the foundation of everything I have done since.
In 2016 I moved to Strasbourg for graduate study. It was there, through my work with Johann Strauss, Stéphane de Tapia, Samim Akgönül, and Damien Coulon, that I was introduced to the wider horizons of Turkic studies: intellectual history, migrations, Ottoman translation movements, medieval Anatolia. These encounters opened new directions without displacing the philological core of my work; they rather helped me see how deeply language is entangled with the histories that are told through it.
My doctoral dissertation, co-supervised by Stéphane de Tapia and Damien Coulon, examines the influence of the nineteenth-century French orientalist Léon Cahun on Turkist movements and on the changing perception of the Middle Ages in Turkish historiography, from the late Ottoman period to the present. It is titled Des steppes à la République : l’historien Léon Cahun, les mouvements turquistes et la transformation de la perception du Moyen Âge dans l’historiographie turque (seconde moitié du XIXe siècle à nos jours). I defended it in September 2026 at the University of Strasbourg.
Between 2019 and 2025 I taught at the Department of Turkish Studies at the University of Strasbourg, first as adjunct lecturer, then as lecturer, and finally as Temporary Teaching and Research Fellow (ATER). I am now an associate researcher at LiLPa (Linguistique, Langues, Parole, UR 1339) and at GEO (Groupe d’études orientales, slaves et néo-helléniques, UR 1340), both at the University of Strasbourg.
Now that the dissertation is behind me, I am returning to the philological core of my work, with a post-doctoral project centred on Old Turkic, the oldest attested stages of the Turkic language family. For me this is less a new departure than a return: the thread that has run through my work since Istanbul, now taken up as its own subject. Further details will be announced in due course.