Elif Yumru
BA (Koç), MA (Sciences Po)
College roles
Skilliter Centre Postgraduate Researcher
Biography
After completing her undergraduate degree at Koç University in Istanbul, double majoring in History and Archaeology & Art History, Elif Yumru pursued a Master’s in the History department at Sciences Po Paris where she received the René Seydoux Scholarship. Her master’s thesis focused on the theme of public image through the case study of a nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian female figure, Princess Nazlı Fazıl (1856/7-1913). It aimed to understand how and why Princess Nazlı became a political actor and a public figure in the nineteenth century in the Ottoman, British, and French presses.
She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, funded by the Cambridge International and Newnham College Scholarship. Her research at Cambridge, which is supervised by Dr. Kate Fleet, focuses on Ottoman women during and in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. She examines the changes in how women were perceived in society, their involvement in politics, the apprehension that arose in Ottoman society regarding their evolving roles, and the aspects of women’s lives that remained unchanged despite the Revolution.
Research Interests
Her research interests include the history of Ottoman women, the political, cultural, and social relations between the Ottoman Empire, France, and the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the history of the press and propaganda in the Ottoman Empire. Her article on Princess’s Nazlı Fazıl’s 1899 interview in a British women’s journal The Gentlewoman has been published in Middle Eastern Studies: ‘“An Oriental Gentlewoman”: Princess Nazlı Fazıl’s Interview in The Gentlewoman in 1899’. Middle Eastern Studies, 8 September 2023, 1–13.