Muhammet Topal
I earned my bachelor’s degree from the Department of History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. My decision to pursue studies in this discipline and to cultivate an academic career stem from my curiosity and delight in history as a subject matter. L. P. Hartley's eloquent phrase, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." encapsulates this interest of mine succinctly and has profoundly transformed my perception of history into awe and made me glimpse all the power and weakness of the historian in an exclusive manner.
During my undergraduate education, I had the enriching experience of studying in France at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (SciencesPo). Following my return to Istanbul, I completed my final project, Uncertainty of the Persian Border: An Overview of the Ottoman-Iran Border Issues from the Erzurum Treaty of 1823 to the Istanbul Protocol of 1913, under the supervision of Edhem Eldem. Subsequently, I continued my graduate studies in France at the Department of Civilizations, Culture, and Society of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE – PSL).
My undergraduate years fostered an openness to various disciplines, particularly the humanities and social sciences. In Paris, I wanted to do somehow with the EPHE a... return to the sources, to the work on the sources, the texts in Ottoman, the archives. There, I worked as an archivist and librarian at the library of the École normale supérieure (ENS-Ulm) while pursuing seminars at EPHE, Sorbonne, EHESS, and Collège de France. Upon completing my master's studies, I wrote my thesis, Individuation et politisation, portrait d'un intellectuel ottoman en tant que journaliste: Mehmed Murad, under the guidance of Özgür Türesay, and defended before a jury consisting of Özgür Türesay, Nicolas Vatin, and Alexandre Toumarkine.
Currently, under the supervision of Benjamin C. Fortna, I am engaged in my PhD project—a trans-imperial biography of the prominent Ottoman intellectual, Mehmed Murad (1854-1917). Writing Murad’s biography is not merely an end in itself but an approach that employs global-microhistory, intellectual history, and biography as methodologies to comprehend the spirit of the long 19th century through the entangled histories, geographies, circles, and ideas that he traversed.