About Us
The Ottoman Demographic, Social and Family History (ODSFH) Research Group is housed at the Center for Middle East and North African Studies at Binghamton University, SUNY. We are a group of faculty, post-doctoral scholars, advanced doctoral students, and a growing number of international partners involved in the indexing and cataloguing of documents related to the demography of the Ottoman Empire. Our goal is to make this historical data accessible to researchers, as well as the general public. By so doing, this will make hitherto inaccessible documents of family and social historical significance related to the Ottoman Empire and its successor states accessible to a broad audience.
Data collected by ODSFH will be added to the genealogical records and resources at Familysearch.org, available to individuals interested in exploring their family history. It provides tools for building family trees, searching historical records, and connecting with others interested in genealogy. Family Search International funds the research conducted by the ODSFH research group at Binghamton University. We acknowledge Family Search as a primary contributor of research support.
This partnership facilitates the advancement of research on the Ottoman Empire and its populations for demographic, social, and family history of a region of the world and in languages largely inaccessible to the general public. It will also facilitate the acquisition, preservation, and processing of Ottoman language documents held in the National Archives of former Ottoman territories across the Middle East, North Africa, the Caucasus, and Southeastern Europe, most of which are poorly preserved and inaccessible to academics and the general public.
Our Binghamton Team
Members of the ODSFH Research Group include:
Kent F. Schull, PhD is Associate Professor of Ottoman and modern Middle East History and Director of both the Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies (CMENAS) and The Ottoman Demographic, Social and Family History Research Group at Binghamton University, SUNY. He was also the Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago during the Spring 2025 term. He received his Bachelors in history and Arabic from BYU (1999), Graduate Diploma in Jewish Studies from Oxford University (2000), and his MA and Doctorate from UCLA in Middle East & Ottoman History (2007). He is a twice Fulbright Scholar to Turkey. His publications include Missionary to the Middle East: The Journals of Joseph Wilford Booth, co-authored with James Toronto (BYU RSC & Deseret Books, 2024), Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), and three co-edited volumes: Living in the Ottoman Realm: Sultans, Subjects, and Elites (Indiana University Press, 2016); Law and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire & Republic of Turkey (IUP, 2016); and Subjects of Ottoman International Law (IUP, 2020). He is currently book series editor for Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire and the former editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2013-18). His research interests include the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East, criminal justice, Missiology, Armenians in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East, Forced Migration in the MENA region, and Ottoman Demographic and Family History.
Sibel Karakoc, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Binghamton University’s CMENAS and the co-coordinator of the ODFSH research group. Her research focuses on forced migration, population movements, and refugee settlements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. She investigates how refugees and refugee settlements were influenced and manipulated by global economic concerns. She is also a lecturer at Binghamton University.
Seriyye Akan is a PhD candidate and graduate assistant in the History Department at SUNY, Binghamton University. She holds a B.A. in Economics from Yıldız Technical University and an M.A. in History from Boğaziçi University, both of which are located in Istanbul, Türkiye. Her research primarily focuses on the intellectual history and modernization of the late Ottoman Empire within its global historical context. Her academic interests include the history of science, the history and philosophy of biology, biological evolution, gender studies, translation theories, economic thought, and auto/biography. Her articles on Ottoman modernization, nationalism, and economic thought have been published in various academic and popular journals.
Ahmet Kaan Akyüz is a PhD student at Binghamton University, SUNY. He received his B.A. in International Relations and M.A. in History at Bilkent University. His M.A. thesis focused on American missionary diplomacy in the late Ottoman Empire. His research interests include the history of the late Ottoman Empire, early Republican Turkey, American missionaries, and Ottoman-US relations.
Turan Bayram is a third-year PhD candidate in the History Department at Binghamton University. His research explores the intersection of the history of medicine and environmental history in Western Anatolia, with particular attention to how health and ecological concerns shaped and were shaped by imperial structures. His broader academic interests include imperial interactions, state-building processes, and the history of infrastructures in the late Ottoman context. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication and Design and has a background in journalism, which he briefly practiced before turning to historical research.
Lynda Carroll is a PhD Candidate at Binghamton University in the Department of Anthropology, and a Lecturer of Anthropology at Cortland College, SUNY. She is a historical archaeologist with a specialization in archaeology of the Ottoman Empire. She has worked on Ottoman period sites in Jordan and Türkiye. Her doctoral thesis investigates an archaeological site on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and how memory, politics, and materiality influence archaeological interpretations of the past. Her publications include An Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire (co-editor with Uzi Baram, 2000), and articles in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology and Near Eastern Archaeology. Lynda also serves as the webmaster for this site.
Numan Deniz is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Binghamton University, SUNY. His dissertation examines the transformation of relations and mutual perceptions between the Ottoman Empire and France during the French Revolution. He has published in Middle Eastern Studies and Toplumsal Tarih Akademi, and has presented his research at academic conferences. He served as co-head editor of the Binghamton Journal of History. He earned his M.A. in History from Istanbul Bilgi University in 2020.
Şahika Karatepe is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Binghamton University, where she is completing her dissertation titled “Labor, Gender, Nature, and the Politics of Expropriation: Armenian Peasantry in the Bardizag Region of the Ottoman Empire (1790–1924).” She holds an M.A. in Modern Turkish History from Boğaziçi University. She has designed and taught courses on the history of the Armenian Genocide, colonialism, gender and sexuality in both Middle Eastern and American contexts.She previously worked as a researcher for the Hrant Dink Foundation’s Turkey Cultural Heritage Map project, where she conducted archival research on Assyrian, Nestorian, and Chaldean cultural heritage sites across Anatolia. Her articles and interviews have been published in Çatlak Zemin, Evrensel, 5Harfliler, and Bilim ve Gelecek. Her broader academic interests include historical materialism, social reproduction theory, world-systems analysis, and the global history of capitalism. She also serves on the advisory board of the Polen Ecology Network
Emine Esra Nalbant is a PhD candidate in the Art History department at Binghamton University; she is working on the intersection of technological innovation and coastal safety within the broader context of Ottoman maritime networks, contributing invaluable insights into global urban and maritime history.
Timur Saitov earned his Ph.D. in History from Binghamton University, SUNY, in 2025. He specializes in Refugee History, the Modern Middle East, and Eastern European and Eurasian history. His research interests include migration, cross-cultural communication, identity formation, agency, memory, imperialism, nationalism, and the legacies of modernity. His dissertation, Russian Exiles in Post-WWI Istanbul: The Emergence of Modern Refugees under the Ottoman Post-War Government and the Allied Occupational Administration, positions the Russian Civil War refugees in Istanbul as a unique historical group that triggered the invention of the category of modern, internationalized refugees by newly emerged international organizations, humanitarian institutions, and global powers, including the Ottoman government. Timur has published several academic articles and journalistic essays on topics related to his research. Outside of academia, he enjoys engaging in community activities and playing music.
Kadir Sarp Sök is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY). He holds an M.A. in History from Bilkent University. His research focuses on the late Ottoman Empire, particularly on the intersections of humanitarianism, governance, and crisis. His broader interests include the history of migration, state-society relations, and the global history of humanitarianism. He examines how institutions and discourses of aid evolved in response to war, migration, and disaster in the early twentieth century.
Marco Ali Spadaccini, PhD received his doctorate in 2025 in history from Binghamton University, SUNY. His dissertation was titled “The Abode of Friendship: Trade and Diplomacy in the Ottoman, Venetian, and Papal Adriatic (1453–1604).” His scholarship sits at the intersection of European and Ottoman history in the early modern period with research interests in cross-cultural exchange, diplomacy, trade, and legal history. His doctoral thesis investigates the role of free Muslim merchants in creating a legal and diplomatic framework that allowed Muslims and Jews trade in the center-northern Adriatic with a specific focus on Ancona in the Papal States. Marco Alì published articles for the Quaderni dell’Archivio di Stato di Ancona in 2021, Studi Veneziani in 2023, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (forthcoming in 2025).
Furkan Taşpınar is currently a Ph.D. student in history at Binghamton University. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Boğaziçi University and Bilkent University, respectively. His master’s thesis, titled “An Early Monetization?: Tracing the Mukâta‘a System Back to the Reign of Mehmed II,” examines the extent of monetization of the Ottoman economy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with a focus on the networks of tax farmers and guarantors alongside the imperial sanctions implemented over them. His broader research interests include the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Balkans, and the history of capitalism.
Yunus Emre Tortamış received his master’s degree in History from Bilkent University, Turkey in 2019. He is currently doing his PhD in History at Binghamton University, specializing in Early Modern Ottoman History, environmental history, and nomadism. Yunus also contributes to digital humanities projects, and is part of the ODSFH website team.
Deniz A. Uyan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Binghamton University. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in History with a minor in Sociology from Middle East Technical University, followed by a Master’s degree in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, with a thesis titled “Historicizing the Nationalization in Albanian Provinces: Divergent Strategies, State-Formation, and Geo-Political Competition.” His research interests lie at the intersection of theoretical debates on the transition to capitalism within international historical sociology and empirical studies of socio-political movements in the Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on the Balkan and Eastern Anatolian borderlands. His ongoing doctoral dissertation, Recontextualizing the Ottoman Transformation: Combined and Uneven Trajectories of Albanian and Kurdistan Frontiers, investigates the historical divergence of socio-political conflict and nationalization processes in the Albanian and Kurdistan provinces through the interplay of social-property relations, state formation, and geopolitics.He previously worked as a research fellow on the ERC Project, Urban Occupations OETR, where he conducted research on Ottoman population registers and utilized GIS and OCR tools to map and analyze the findings.