Ebru Boyar
MSc (METU), PhD (Cantab)
College roles
Academic Advisor to the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies
Biography
Professor Ebru Boyar studied international relations at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, specialising for her M.Sc. on the development of national identity in Algeria. She then did a Ph.D. in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, on late Ottoman and early Republican representations of the Balkans. She is Professor in and was chair of the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, where she teaches world history, Ottoman, Turkish and modern Middle Eastern history.
Research Interests
Her current research focuses on Ottoman and Turkish republican social history, with a particular emphasis on the social history of health in the Ottoman and early Turkish republican periods and on the concept of social disorder in the Ottoman empire. She is also interested in Ottoman and Turkish foreign relations from a social history perspective, in particular, in the personal relations between the Ottoman/Turkish and British elite in the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican period, and Ottoman-Safavid relations of the sixteenth century from the perspective of Ottoman propaganda.
Her books include Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) and, together with Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which has been translated into Chinese and Turkish. She recently edited various volumes together with Kate Fleet: Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Middle Eastern and North African Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019); Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia (Brill: Leiden, 2021); and Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
Her recent publications include “Nations and nationalisms in the late Ottoman Empire”, in The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Volume II Nationalism’s Fields of Interaction, ed. Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria and Aviel Roshwald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 24-42; “The draw of the lottery: Piyango, profit and politics in early twentieth-century İzmir”, in Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 175-205; “The late Ottoman brothel in Istanbul: heterosexual social space for homosocial entertainment?”, in Entertainment among the Ottomans, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 160-82; “Yüzellilikler: the League of Nations’s first and only Muslim refugees”, in Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period, eds. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 105-40 and with Kate Fleet, “Great Britain and ‘a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/6 (2021), 904-19, republished in From Enemies to Allies Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960, ed. Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas and William Hale (London: Routledge, 2023).
For a full publication list, see https://ir.metu.edu.tr/tr/ebru-boyar and https://metu.academia.edu/EbruBoyar.