Saban Agalar

Şaban Ağalar double majored in Political Science and History at Boğaziçi University in 2015. He earned his MA in History from the same university in 2017, writing a thesis on the Jewish conversion and interreligious polemics in the late-fifteenth century Ottoman Empire. Şaban is currently a PhD candidate in the History Department. His primary scholarly interest is early modern Ottoman intellectual history. His dissertation explores Islamic conceptions of religion in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on the transformation of the interrelated terms dīn and millet. In his conceptual study, he relies extensively on universal histories, heresiographies, and religious treatises that deal with faiths and histories of non-Muslim nations. His dissertation integrates an in-depth critical examination of manuscripts in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish with computational methods of textual analysis.