About

Sumeyye is a DPhil researcher in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, specialising in the cultural, political, and technological transformations of the Ottoman Mediterranean and early Republican Turkey (1850–1930). Her work sits at the intersection of Islamic Studies, global histories of Muslims in the modern era, and the political and environmental humanities. She is particularly interested in how infrastructure, space, and capitalism shaped mobility, state power, and political imaginaries across the late Ottoman world. Drawing on her background in Islamic legal and intellectual traditions, Ottoman literature, and historical methods, she examines how emerging transport technologies and globalisation reconfigured social life and ideological formations.

 

Her research contributes to broader conversations on modernity, secularism, liberalism, and the entangled experiences of global Muslim communities.

 

Her research interests include: ​

History of Technology — Innovations, technology, and patterns in history, technology transfer, and the life of technology in the Global South  

History of Religion, Islam, and Muslims in the Modern Era — Appropriation of the sacred and power struggle in social, theological and political context in past and present 

Knowledge Production — neoliberalism and higher education, how empires, states, and intellectual traditions shape and contest the circulation, legitimacy, and politics of knowledge.

 

​​Political Geography — spatial dimensions of imperial governance, mobility, borders, infrastructural power, and the making of political imaginaries.​

Political Philosophy — liberalism, secularism, democracy, and ideological transformations accompanying technological and global transitions.​

Theories and cultures of Democracy — democratic imaginaries, populism, liberalism, and the sociotechnical and ideological conditions that shape democratic life in global and historical perspectives.​

 

Philosophy of History — interrogating historical temporality, modernity, narrative, and the methodological assumptions underlying global historical analysis.​

Reproduction of Space — how infrastructures, built environments, and everyday practices produce and reconfigure social and political space across time.​

History of Speed — cultural and political implications of new transport technologies, acceleration, and changing temporal regimes in the Ottoman and global contexts.