Dr Kutay Onayli

I joined Magdalen as a Fellow by Examination in October 2025. I received my PhD in Near Eastern Studies and Interdisciplinary Humanities, with a certificate in Hellenic Studies, from Princeton University earlier that year.

In the latter stages of my dissertation work, I held the M. Allison Frantz Fellowship at the American School for Classical Studies in Athens. My BA in Middle East Studies & Comparative Literature is from Brown University.

Research

I was trained by both historians and literary scholars, and my research interests range from the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean to Modern Greek and Turkish literatures.

My dissertation, A Laughing Matter: Identity, Alienation, and Imperial Collapse in Ottoman Greek Popular Writing, 1908-1922 is a retelling of the Ottoman Empire’s final years—and of a vibrant and pugnacious late Ottoman society—from the perspective of Istanbul’s Greek authors and journalists, and especially its mass-market satirists.

Tapping into a remarkably unfiltered literary/historical oeuvre that was consumed with extraordinary popularity by the Empire’s largest non-Muslim population, I try to reconstruct how polyethnic coexistence and its violent collapse were experienced and narrated by ordinary Ottomans. The question of what the histories of empire, nationalism, and ‘cosmopolitan’ urban life truly look like from non-majoritarian and non-elite perspectives is at the heart of my work.

Other ongoing research projects include work on women’s self-writing (especially around the so-called ‘crisis’ of marriage and passionate love in the fin de siècle Eastern Mediterranean), the political content and circulation networks of Ottoman popular almanacs, and the Ottoman Empire’s hitherto-unknown first nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.