Dr Orçun Can Okan

I am a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with a keen interest in broader European, West Asian, Mediterranean, and global frameworks of inquiry. I received my PhD in History from Columbia University in 2020. Before joining the ERC-funded Moving Stories project at Oxford, I held a postdoctoral fellowship in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale (SSM) in Naples. Prior to my doctoral and postdoctoral studies in New York and Naples, I studied mainly in Istanbul and worked on my Arabic in Beirut and Cairo. I hold MA degrees in History (Columbia, 2015; Boğaziçi, 2013) and BA degrees in History and Turkish Language and Literature (Boğaziçi, 2010, Boğaziçi, 2010).

Research Interests

My published work focuses on the ends of empire, regime change, state succession, and governance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My first monograph Needs That Bind (Stanford University Press, forthcoming in 2026) examines the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of new regimes in Turkey, Syria-Lebanon, and Iraq after World War I. It discusses subjecthood, nationality, and citizenship through claims to retirement pensions, alimony cases between former spouses who became nationals of different states, and disputes over land, property, and assets held in pious endowments. As a member of the Moving Stories team at Oxford, I engage more systematically with life-writing and narratives of religious identity. I examine how lived experiences and stories of communal difference varied across categories of gender, age, and class. I seek to develop new approaches to tracing historical change in the relations between (and within) communities, as well as in the relations between states and those subject to their military, administrative, and legal authority.

I am currently developing two main projects that build on this research trajectory. The first extends the themes of Needs That Bind by examining regime change and state succession through the experiences of men and women in the medical profession—especially pharmacists and doctors, but also nurses and midwives. Following this second project, I plan to pursue a study of specific sites in former Ottoman territories that are recognized today as sacred—and as "world heritage" in some cases. Conceived as a multiyear collaborative research agenda, this project aims to examine how specific sacred sites (and the figures associated with them) began to coexist and compete in different successor states after the Ottoman demise, under different political regimes with varying systems and priorities of representation by the 1920s.