Morgan Sinan Tufan

Dr. Morgan S. Tufan is a historian of the early modern Middle East and West Asia specializing in the political history of the Ottoman and Safavid empires and Kurdistan. His research examines how imperial authority was negotiated and implemented in frontier regions, with particular attention to the interactions between imperial institutions and local Kurdish elites during the sixteenth century. Drawing on multilingual sources in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, his work explores how borders, alliances, and systems of governance emerged through negotiation, conflict, and collaboration.

His dissertation, At the Edge of Empires, offers the first full history of Kurdistan’s imperial integration, challenging the longstanding narrative of a stable sixteenth-century settlement engineered by Ottoman bureaucrats. Instead, he argues that imperial rule in Kurdistan developed through a conflictual and experimental process marked by repeated crises, negotiations, and political improvisation. More broadly, his research investigates how empires governed “at the edge,” showing how frontier environments, especially the mountainous landscapes of Kurdistan, shaped imperial strategies, produced new political practices, and evolving forms of legitimacy that connected distant frontiers to imperial centers.

Dr. Tufan teaches Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Iranian history.