PrincipaI Investigator
Christopher Markiewicz is an associate research professor in Ottoman and Islamic Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures, and an affiliate member of the Department of History. His research focuses on the political, social, and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Before coming to Ghent in 2023, he was an associate professor in History at the University of Birmingham and junior research fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Christopher Markiewicz completed his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations in 2015, where his dissertation was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award from the Middle East Studies Association of North America (2016).
His past work explored how ideas about history and the nature of kingship in the Ottoman Empire were connected with wider intellectual, cultural, and religious currents across the Islamic world in the early modern period. These interests resulted in the publication of his first book, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He has also published on aspects of diplomatic history, the circulation of intellectuals and ideas, and historical writing in Islamic lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Christopher Markiewicz is the series editor of The Ottoman Empire and the World (I.B Tauris in collaboration with the British Institute at Ankara), and the chair of the EJW Gibb Memorial Trust. In 2023, Christopher Markiewicz was elected a member of the Young Academy of Europe.
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Postdoctoral Researchers
Pinar Ceylan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. In 2024-2025, She was a postdoctoral research on OTTOWAQF and remains involved with the project as an affiliated researcher.
She is a quantitative economic historian specialising in the pre-modern Ottoman Empire. Her research interests include consumption, prices, markets, and rural and accounting history. Her previous work draws on a wide range of primary sources, including probate inventories, tax surveys, waqf (pious foundation) accounting registers, and censuses.
Her current project, funded by UKRI, investigates the relationship between agricultural change and urbanisation in the sixteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean, amid profound transformations in the rural economy and society.
İrem Gündüz-Polat joined the OTTOWAQF team in August 2025 as a postdoctoral fellow on secondment from Sakarya University in Turkey, where she is an assistant professor. Her research interests focus on the role of waqfs within the sociopolitical and legal history of the early Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and the Balkans. Her work often combines close archival research with interdisciplinary and digital approaches.
Within OTTOWAQF, she is working on a book project examining role of waqfs in the political and territorial consolidation of the early Ottoman polity. The book builds upon her doctoral research which focused on the role of the waqfs of Murad II (r. 1421-1451) in shaping Ottoman governance and authority in urban and rural spaces.
Before joining OTTOWAQF, İrem held appointments as a doctoral and postdoctoral research on the ERC project "OTTOLEGAL: The Making of Ottoman Law: The Agency and Interaction of Diverse Groups in Lawmaking, 1450–1650." (Sabancı University, Turkey). During her studies, she was a visiting scholar or exchange student at SUNY Binghamton (2013), SOAS (2014), and EHESS-CETOBaC (2018).
Vincent Thérouin is a postdoctoral researcher focusing on how waqfs shaped the development of ‘new’ settlements in the Ottoman Balkans. After completing a BA in History, he obtained an MA in Art History and Archaeology (Sorbonne Université, 2018) and a PhD in Islamic Archaeology (Sorbonne Université, 2026).
During his doctoral research, his work focused on the evolution of urban spaces in early modern Ottoman Bosnia (fifteenth-seventeenth centuries). Making extensive use of GIS, he compiled, aligned, and spatialized architectural, demographic, and economic data for four settlements (most notably Sarajevo) ‘founded’ under the Ottomans, with the aim of tracing their long-term spatial and temporal transformations.
Within OTTOWAQF, Vincent will build upon this approach following two complementary lines. On the one hand, he will examine additional examples of founded settlements across the Balkan Peninsula, (primarily in the area at the crossroads of present-day Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey). On the other hand, he will explore how “founded” sites interact with their surrounding socio-economic context by analyzing the rural character of these settlements.
Vincent Thérouin participates in the Distam+ consortium (DIgital STudies Africa, Asia, Middle East, 2026-2030), supported by Huma-Num (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France), within the framework of which he contributes to the implementation of digital methods and tools in extra-Western contexts. Vincent also joined the archaeological mission of the Korça Plain (Albania), within which he contributes to the characterization of regional occupation during the Ottoman period by linking Ottoman tax registers, artefacts and ecofacts. He has received training in Modern Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (second BA degree, 2021), and in Modern Standard Arabic (one-year intensive program, 2022).
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Doctoral Reasearchers
Semih Özmeriç is a historian trained in early modern history and culture. He graduated from Galatasaray University (Istanbul) in 2018 with a degree in Comparative Linguistics and received his MA in Early Modern European History (magna cum laude) from KU Leuven (Leuven) in 2020. His master's dissertation examined the correspondence of the French Nation in Salonica during the Seven Years' War, drawing on primary sources from the Prize Papers of the High Court of Admiralty at The National Archives, Kew (London).
He is currently a doctoral researcher in the Department of History at Ghent University and a member of the ERC project OTTOWAQF. His research investigates frontier governance, urban and rural economies, religious networks, and emotional practices in early Ottoman Thessaly, with a particular focus on the Turahanoğlu family. His broader research interests include the comparative history of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the intellectual history of the early modern world, the history of emotions and mentalities, and digital approaches to historical data.
Roman Schärer is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Arabic, Islamic and Middle East Studies at Ghent University and a member of the ERC project OTTOWAQF. He holds a BA (2015) and MA (2018) in History and Arabic from the University of Zurich (Switzerland). From 2020 to 2023, he worked as a research assistant at Heidelberg University (Germany) in a project dedicated to developing a diachronic and cross-culturally applicable theory of charitable foundations and philanthropy. During his time in Heidelberg, he also studied Turkish and Ottoman.
His doctoral dissertation within the OTTOWAQF project focuses on the Awqāf al-Maghāriba in Jerusalem, examining Islamic endowments (waqf) as mechanisms of group formation, communal preservation, and bottom-up governance.
His research interests include waqf studies, the early modern Ottoman Empire, Bilād al-Shām, Ottoman social history, and the Arabic language.
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Affiliated Researchers
Özgen Özcan studied History at Eskişehir Osmangazi University and at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Middle East Technical University, from which she graduated in 2008. During her studies, she also completed a minor in Political Science and Public Administration. She received her MA in History from Bilkent University in 2012.
Since 2009, she has been working at the General Directorate of Foundations, where she currently serves as a Foundation Specialist.
She is proficient in English and Ottoman Turkish and has intermediate knowledge of French and Latin. Her research interests include the Ottoman land system, the institution of foundations, and historical methodology.
Ramiz Üzümçeker is a lecturer in world history and modern Turkish history at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. He is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University. His research focuses on the relationship between war and the evolution of state finances in the Ottoman Empire and Europe. He contributes to the project as a consultant, assisting with the reading and interpretation of vakıf accounting registers.
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Project Coordinator
Els Bourgeois is the Project Coordinator of the OTTOWAQF ERC project. She oversees the project’s daily organization and ensures its smooth operation.
She also serves as the main point of contact for workshop participants, visiting researchers, and attendees of project activities, providing information and guiding inquiries to the appropriate contact.
