People

Current Contributors:

Adrien Zakar is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Previously, he received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2018 and then worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center and a lecturer in the Department of History at the same institution. Adrien is a historian of science and technology with expertise in maps, visual practices, and spatial history. Using a new range of archival sources in Ottoman, Turkish, Arabic, and French, his work joins historical research with an interdisciplinary approach to science and technology studies, critical geography, and war studies. Outside his individual research, Adrien enjoys collaborating with creative professionals and student engineers towards generating cutting-edge visualizations and processes that engage with the past as much as contemporary questions and concerns such as the attention economy and global shipping routes. For more information, visit: adrienzakar.com

Merve Tekgürler is the co-founder of Cistern and a PhD student in History at Stanford University. They have a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University, Berlin. In their dissertation research, Merve is working on Ottoman-Polish borderlands in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a focus on changes and continuities north of the Danubian River in relation to Russian and Austrian imperial policy. Merve’s interest in spatial analysis and digital humanities is related to understanding human geography as an integral part of history. Aside from the Cistern project, Merve is working on training a handwritten text recognition model for eighteenth century Ottoman Turkish and is contributing to Mapping Ottoman Epirus project. Outside the academia, Merve enjoys scuba diving, playing Animal Crossing, and traveling.

Umar Patel is a second year undergraduate student double majoring in Computer Science and Archaeology and minoring in Mechanical Engineering. Umar holds widespread passions in technical and engineering fields, and enjoys pursuing them via his interests in late Ancient and Medieval European contexts. His projects revolve around the cross-section of computer science and archaeology, notably including conducting an engineering analysis of the construction of Stonehenge and developing virtual models for late Roman shipwrecks to use mathematical and computational analysis in determining stacking methods for Roman cargoes in the Mediterranean. Umar’s other technical pursuits include Machine Learning (particularly Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision) and Virtual Reality, both of which he is using to help develop Cistern’s geographical works database and a virtual museum to display early modern Ottoman heritage. When he is not working on digital humanities, Umar’s main focus is on developing novel machine learning applications such as chatbots, information retrieval programs, and recommender systems, or on developing virtual worlds with Unity 3D software. In his free time, Umar loves to tinker with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis as well as read about Medieval British history dating back to the Anglo-Saxons.

Isin Taylan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. She studied Social and Political Sciences with a minor in Art Theory and Criticism at Sabancı University and Sciences Po Paris. She holds MA degrees in History from Central European University and Sabancı University. Her dissertation, “The Atlas and the Making of Modern Geography in the Ottoman Empire”, examines the making of the discipline of geography in the Ottoman Empire through the emergence and rise of the genre of the atlas from the seventeenth to twentieth century. She has a forthcoming article in Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography which introduces early Ottoman atlases as a source for the history of cartography. She is also a recording team member and host at the Ottoman History Podcast.

Jayna Huang is a high school student interested in computer science, history, and sociology. She especially enjoys perusing the development of early societies, using code for practical problem-solving, and exploring Christianity in the modern context. With Cistern, Jayna has helped develop a database to succinctly organize Ottoman geographical knowledge and also has created this website to host it. In her free time, Jayna enjoys playing soccer, watching the sunset, and playing guitar.

Past Contributors:

Keoni Rodriguez is a BA (History) and MA (Earth Systems) candidate at Stanford from San Diego, CA. Their scholarship is primarily concerned with Indigenous environmental history and identity formation and they worked with the "Mapping Geographical Knowledge in the Middle East" project in Winter 2021.