Ezgi Cakmak

Ezgi Cakmak received her Ph.D. as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Before her doctoral studies, she worked with NGOs in the field of international migration and conducted fieldwork with African migrants in Istanbul. Her research interests include African slavery in the late Ottoman empire, identity formation and racialization processes in the early Turkish Republic as well as diaspora studies.

Publications:

• “Enslavement Practices in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History” (Fall 2024) forthcoming

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• Rutgers Newark-ISGRJ Conversations and Connections Lecture Series

• NYU- Global Asia public lecture

Previous Organizations: 

• NYU Global Asia

• MESA

Accomplishments:

• Lexicons of Race Project -MESA

Upcoming Projects:

• Publication:“Entangled Histories of Africanness and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire,” in History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Meltem Toksoz (London: Routledge, Fall 2026) forthcoming

• Book Manuscript preparation for Columbia Press

My work aims to dismantle the single narrative around blackness shaped by the Transatlantic experience and bring an unvoiced perspective to various racialiazation processes on the global perspective. Thus it not only concerns with the hierarchy within the scholarship that has been centralized around "the Western" experience on race, but also sheds light on the silence around race and particularly Blackness in the Middle East.