Merve Tekgürler
HAI Graduate Fellow
Merve Tekgürler is a PhD candidate in History (ABD) and an M.S. student in Symbolic Systems. They have a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in History from Stanford. Merve’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Crucible of Empire: Danubian Borderlands and the Making of Ottoman Administrative Mentalities,” focuses on the Ottoman-Polish borderlands in the long 18th century (1760s-1820s), examining the changes and continuities north of the Danube River in relation to Russian and Austrian expansions. They study the Ottoman news and information networks in this region and their impact on production and mobilization of imperial knowledge. Previously, Merve held the inaugural Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship (AY 2023-24) and was G.J. Pigott Scholar (AY 2022-23). They also worked as senior Digital Humanities fellow at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University. Currently, Merve is working on training a neural machine translation model for translating Ottoman Turkish into English. They believe that a first-pass translator of primary source materials will significantly expand the availability and representation of more diverse historical accounts in academia and beyond. They are also exploring the capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models in this task.
Department: History