Introducing Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu, Associate Professor of History, as the New Faculty Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies is pleased to announce that Ali Yaycıoğlu, Associate Professor of History, is its new Faculty Director.

Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Ali Yaycıoğlu studied International Relations at the Middle East Technical University and Ottoman History at Bilkent University. Then, he moved to Montreal and studied Arabic and history of Islamic law at McGill University. Dr. Yaycıoğlu completed his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2008. After his Ph.D., he carried out post-doctoral studies in the Agha Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and then in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. He joined the History Department at Stanford in 2011.

Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016) offers a rethinking of the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dr. Yaycıoğlu’s forthcoming book is entitled The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman Empire, analyzing transformations in property, finance and statehood in the Ottoman world.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu is also a cultural and political commentator writing for Gazete Oksijen, a weekly newspaper in Turkey and an associate member of the Centre d'études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques at L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

Dr. Yaycıoğlu is married to Patricia Blessing, professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Stanford’s Art and Art History Department and he is the father of Aline Reyhan Yaycıoğlu. You can follow him on Twitter at @ayayciog.