The new member of our department Dr. Börekçi received a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University in 1991-1996, after which he switched disciplines and joined the same university’s History Department over 1996-1999, where he wrote his MA thesis (under the supervision of the lat Prof. Zafer Toprak) on “The French Revolution and the Ottomans: Popular Images of ‘Liberty-Equality-Fraternity’ in Late Ottoman Iconography, 1908-1912.” Then over 1999-2002 he attended the PhD program at Sabancı, subsequently moving to Ohio State University in the US, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral thesis (with Prof. Jane Hathaway) on “Factions and Favorites at the Courts of Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603-17) and his Immediate Predecessors.” That same year he was one of the founders of the History Department at İstanbul Şehir University, where he taught as an Assistant Professor for the next seven years, moving, after Şehir University closed down, to Central European University (long in Budapest, now in Vienna), where he taught, in the Departments of History and Medieval Studies, for another seven years. It is from CEU that he is now joining us at Ibn Haldun University.
Günhan Börekçi is fundamentally an Ottomanist specializing in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the same time, he has been teaching a variety of courses in world and European history. He has the grounding for this multi-tasking capability, starting with his comprehensives at OSU which he took in Islamic and Ottoman History (Profs. Jane Hathaway and Stephen F. Dale), Early Modern European history (Prof. Geoffrey Parker), and Early Modern Islamic art and architecture (Prof. Howard Crane). This year, indeed, as part of IHU’s University Courses core curriculum he will be teaching SPS 101-102 (formerly offered by Prof Halil Berktay), as well as HIST 505-506 (World Historiography I-II), which is a key course for the History MA and PhD programs. We are delighted to welcome Assoc. Prof. Günhan Börekçi and to wih him every success.
