Department of History

Arif Erbil received his B.A. in Political Science and History and an M.A. in History from Boğaziçi University, located in Istanbul. Additionally, he holds an A.M. in Religious Studies from Duke University. His research focused on the interaction between Mamluk intellectual heritage and the sixteenth-century Ottoman world, with a special emphasis on juristic language in political thought through translations. Arif remains intrigued by the intersection of political and legal thought in the early modern Ottoman Empire, adopting a spatially and temporally comparative and theoretically diverse approach. He aims to question the place of governmental authority, its limits, intellectual backdrop, and the enduring distinctions between premodern and modern eras.