Committees and Advisory Board
TIOL4 Organising Committee
Dr Ines Aščerić-Todd – TIOL
Senior Lecturer in Arabic & Middle Eastern Cultures,
Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies,
University of Edinburgh
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/ines-asceric-todd
Dr Peter Cherry – TIOL
Assistant Director, Ottoman and Contemporary Turkish Studies,
British Institute at Ankara (BIAA)
Academic Working Group, the Feriköy project
http://www.ferikoycemetery.org/
Dr Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri
UK House of Lords Political Adviser
Public Affairs Manager, Demos
Quentin Compton-Bishop – LHF
Chair of Levantine Heritage Foundation,
a former diplomat and Middle East specialist
Dr Marloes Cornelissen Aydemir – TIOL
Instructor,
Sabancı Üniversitesi, Istanbul
Dr Paul Csillag – TIOL
Researcher, South Tyrolean Museum of Mining, Brixen/Bressanone.
An historian and joint editor of TIOL3 publication.
Craig Encer – LHF
Independent scholar specialising in multiculturalism
in the Levant.
Malte Fuhmann
Historian of the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, and Southeast Europe. He is currently the academic coordinator of the Hafiza İzmir: Izmir Memories Project at Gießen University. A prize-winning author, he is currently working on a monograph about Ottoman, Turkish, and Bulgarian entangled infrastructures and power.
Dr Leonidas Karakatsanis
Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in
the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies
at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki,
and Honorary Fellow of the British Institute at Ankara.
Philip Mansel FRHS – LHF
An author and historian of France and the Middle East,
with a particular interest in the Levant.
Dr Sebastian Marshall
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, St Andrew’s University.
Researching sources produced by European travellers to the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century. Papers include The travels of Edward Falkener: a Victorian architect in Ottoman Anatolia and Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece: Popular Topography from the Illustrated Serial to the Gift Book.
Dr Gemma Masson – TIOL
Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
PhD graduate from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman
and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham.
Assistant Editor Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations Journal,
Editor & Reviews Editor H-Empire, Editor H-Folk
Luis Miguel Selvelli – LHF
Author and researcher into Levantine culture, family heritage
and political history of the late Ottoman Empire
Dr Zeynep Simavi – TIOL
Istanbul Branch Director, American Research Institute
in Turkey (ARIT)
Academic Working Group, the Feriköy project
http://www.ferikoycemetery.org/
Dr Janet Starkey – TIOL
Author, editor and lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies,
University of The Third Age and Durham University (retired).
Founder member of ASTENE and TIOL.
Professor Paul Starkey – TIOL
Professor Emeritus, Durham University; First chair of ASTENE.
Vice-President of BRISMES 2012–2018; TIOL Chair.
A specialist on Arabic literature and culture.
Alexandros Symalidis – LHF
Third-year student in the Department of Balkan Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Julie Witford
Special Projects, Cornucopia Magazine
https://www.cornucopia.net/
TIOL3 Publication
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Ines Aščerić-Todd
Marloes Cornelissen Aydemir
Paul Csillag
Janet Starkey
Paul Starkey
TIOL 4 Scientific Board
Dr Mike Carr
Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a BA in Ancient History from the University of Birmingham, and an MA and a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, and has held research fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research in London and the British School in Rome. Dr Carr’s research focuses on the Mediterranean, c.1000-1500, especially the interactions between Byzantium, the Islamic world and the Latin West, and he has published works on the papacy, the crusades, merchants, and maritime travel and trade in the medieval Mediterranean.
https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/mike-carr
Dr Iannis Carras
Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary European and Balkan History in the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University SAIS, and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he completed his doctorate on Balkan merchants in the Russian Empire. His research focuses on the social, economic, and intellectual history of Southeast Europe and Russia. He has published extensively on migration, identity, Orthodoxy, and the Enlightenment, and has also worked as a political analyst and commentator.
Dr Işılay Gürsu
Assistant Director at the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA). Dr Gürsu’s research focuses on public archaeology, cultural heritage, and the relationships between archaeology, society, and the state. She is the author of Public Dialogues in Archaeology: New Methodologies from Turkey (Bloomsbury, 2026), and has published widely in English and Turkish on public perceptions of archaeology, heritage politics, and the social and economic impacts of archaeological heritage. She has also taught in the Department of Archaeology at Bilkent University, contributed to UNESCO’s Online Course ‘Preventing Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property’, and co-hosts the Heritage Türkiye podcast with the other assistant director of the BIAA, Dr Peter Cherry.
Dr Nicole Immig
Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Department of History, East European Studies, Faculty Member Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, History, Post-Doc Bogazici University, History Department, Department Member.
Main research interests are Historical Migrations, Visual History of the Balkans, Popular Culture, History of Tourism, Urban Studies and the History of Media and Communication in South-Eastern Europe.
Read more here:
https://uni-giessen.academia.edu/NicoleImmig
Dr Ayşe Ozil
Associate Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University, Istanbul. Dr Ozil’s research explores the social history of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, focusing on Greek communities, social networks, institutional modernization, and urbanization. She is the author of Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (Routledge, 2013) and various articles in journals. Her current research explores commercial networks in Galata, the preliminary findings of which can be found in this online exhibition: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/HQWhQ-nXDqLkBg
Prof Dr Dimitris Stamatopoulos
Professor of Balkan and Late Ottoman History at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki. Prof Stamatopoulos has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and has held visiting appointments at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Princeton University, and the Institute of European History in Mainz. His research focuses on the history of Orthodox Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on Balkan, Ottoman, and East European history, nationalism, and historiography.
Prof Rebecca Sweetman
Director of the British School at Athens, and Professor of Ancient History & Archaeology at the School of Classics, University of St Andrews. Prof Sweetman is an archaeologist who specialises in Mediterranean archaeology, in particular in Roman and Late Antique Crete, the Cyclades and the Peloponnese (especially Sparta). Her recent research also involves collaborative, interdisciplinary work on digital reconstructions of archaeological sites, and studying the effects of haptic (touch-based) experiences with archaeology for emotional wellbeing and self-esteem. She is currently co-directing, with Dan Stewart (Leicester), a new BSA, five-year fieldwork project at Knossos, investigating Roman remains in the northern part of the Knossos valley. https://www.bsa.ac.uk/director/
https://www.standrews.ac.uk/classics/people/rs43/
Dr Zeynep Tezer
Researcher at the Orient-Institut-İstanbul. Dr Tezer earned her PhD in History at the University of Chicago, after which she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. She is a social and cultural historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, focusing on social marginalisation, intersectionality, subaltern critique, and their literary expressions. In addition, Dr Tezer is interested in trans-imperial and transnational entanglements in the Ottoman Mediterranean during the transition to modernity and is currently developing a project on Ottoman Tunisia and its Mediterranean entanglements, exploring, among others, the topic of Ottoman travellers and exilés on and across the Greek islands in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.