Yuxuan Cai
College roles
Skilliter Centre Postgraduate Researcher
Biography
Yuxuan Cai is a second-year PhD student in History at St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. Her research interests focus on the post-Byzantine / early Ottoman southern Balkans and the early modern Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. Her PhD thesis, under Dr. Kate Fleet’s supervision, addresses the transformation of Ottoman Thessaly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Research Interests
Before studying at Cambridge, she earned her MA in History at Georgetown University in 2021. She completed a master thesis entitled ‘Writing History in an Empire-to-be: Fifteenth- and Early-sixteenth-century Ottoman Historical Accounts on the Family of Turahanoğlu’, supervised by Professor Gábor Ágoston. It examines the transformation of the image of marcher lords in Ottoman narratives, which were increasingly used as a means to craft an imperial image of the Ottoman polity and sultanic supremacy.
Yuxuan also works on academic translation. She has translated The Imperial Harem (Pierce, Leslie. 1993) and Empress of the East (Pierce, Leslie. 2017) into Chinese. The ongoing projects are the Chinese versions of The Last Muslim Conquest (Ágoston, Gábor. 2021) and The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger.