The project, led by BIAA Assistant Director Dr Peter Cherry, aims to investigate the dynamics of mobility—of people, ideas, objects, cultural/artistic forms, and institutions—across the Ottoman Empire. The appointed Fellows will be based at the BIAA in Ankara and work closely with other BIRI until March 2026.
Dr Aytek Soner Alpan, cross-appointed with the British School at Athens (BSA), will undertake research on the topic Before and Beyond Lausanne: Ottoman Refugee Politics and the Global Emergence of Modern Population Management, examining how the Ottoman Empire’s long experience with refugee flows both shaped modern practices of population governance and positioned the empire as a central actor in the global history of forced migration.
Dr Mehmet Doğar, under the auspices of the BIAA and British School at Rome (BSR), will focus on Industrialists on the Move: Networks of Italian Economic Expansion in the Late Ottoman Empire, examining how Italian industrialists and financiers leveraged their mobility and on-the-ground networks to navigate the complex political and economic landscape of the late Ottoman Empire. These networks not only advanced Italian economic interests in the region but also served as tools of informal diplomacy, transforming personal connections and local knowledge into diplomatic capital.
Dr Ahmet Tekin, with the support of the BIAA and British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies (BILNAS), will carry out a project on Mapping Coerced Mobilities: English Captives, Ottoman Governance, and the Ransom in North Africa, to reinterpret captivity as a monetised form of mobility that connected local actors with distant imperial centres, producing both political tensions and economic value.
Dr Gizem Tongo (BIAA Postdoctoral Fellow 2018-2020) will work closely with the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS) on Ottoman Mobilities and the Making of Islamic Art Histories: The Case of Armenag Sakisian (1871–1944), which will explore the life of the Ottoman-born Armenian Catholic intellectual and scholar of Islamic art whose career bridged Istanbul and interwar Paris.