Ali Yaycıoğlu

Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian specializing in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research examines various dimensions of political, economic, and legal institutions and practices, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of the Ottoman world and Turkey, from the sixteenth century to the present. He is also interested in using digital tools to understand, visualize, and conceptualize historical developments. Dr. Yaycıoğlu teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey; Empires, Markets & Networks in the Early Modern World; the Age of Revolutions; Histories of Democracy and Capitalism; and Digital Humanities.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu's first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016), offers a radical rethinking of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the global context of the age of revolutions. Over this unstable period, the Ottoman Empire faced political crises, institutional shakeups, and popular insurrections. This book takes a holistic look at the era, interested not simply in central reforms or in regional developments, but in their interactions. Drawing on original archival sources, Ali Yaycioglu uncovers the patterns of political action—the making and unmaking of coalitions, forms of building and losing power, and expressions of public opinion.

Ali Yaycıoğlu is currently working on two book projects. The first, titled The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire, investigates the relationship between property, capital, finance, and Ottoman statehood during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This project is supported by a digital initiative called Charting the Empire, based at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Through this initiative, he examines political and financial actors, the accumulation of capital and power, debts, networks of liabilities, and state order in the Ottoman Empire from 1750 to 1850, drawing on Ottoman fiscal documents and codices that employ unique accounting techniques.

His second book, tentatively titled State, Religion, and People: The Ottoman Empire as a Political Community, focuses on collective actors, popular movements and public quarrels exploring the potential of a people-centric alternative narrative of the Ottoman Empire.

He also co-edited the Ottoman Digital Humanities Special Issue of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies (2023) and Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston, 2023). Dr. Yaycıoğlu's essays on democracy, capitalism and populism in Turkey was published in his Uncertain Past Time: Empire, Republic, and Politics (in Turkish, Istanbul, 2024). Dr. Yaycıoğlu is the co-editor of the Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature and Knowledge also oversees a digital history project, Charting the Empire and Mapping Ottoman Epirus, housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Dr. Yaycıoğlu earned degrees in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University and in Ottoman History from Bilkent University. He pursued further studies at McGill University in Montreal, focusing on Arabic and Islamic legal history. Dr. Yaycıoğlu completed his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2008, followed by post-doctoral work in the Agha Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and later in Hellenic Studies at Princeton. He joined the History Department at Stanford in 2011. Dr. Yaycıoğlu regularly writes opinion pieces on history and contemporary politics, primarily focusing on Turkey and the world for Gazete Oksijen and other media outlets in both Turkish and English. In parallel with his academic work, he engages in visual arts under the name "Critical Imagination," producing artistic work in Palo Alto and Istanbul through the Atölye20 platform.