Faculty

Ali M. Ugurlu is a historian of the Late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. He works between intellectual history, social theory, and critical political economy, with a focus on the relationship between conceptual change and capitalist social transformation. He is completing a dissertation on the intellectual history of freedom with a focus on intellectuals who wrote in (and sometimes between) Ottoman-Turkish and Arabic at the historical junction of imperial-dissolution and nation-making (1860s-1910s), when a sea-change in Ottoman freedom imaginaries prompted a concern with a central paradox of modern life: capitalism as bearer of both novel emancipatory possibility and boundless suffering. Sharing a family resemblance of concerns, his second project is on Marxism’s transfiguration into an aesthetic across the newly-formed borders of the post-Ottoman world in the early 20th century. His research has been made possible by the support of the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and his writing has appeared in the Arab Studies Quarterly. Ali holds a BA from Rutgers, an MA from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and is finishing up his PhD at Columbia.