The mid-term evaluation is organized in two parts and starts with a 2-hour public seminar, followed by a closed meeting.
The purpose of the evaluation is to assess the progress of the PhD project at a point when it is still possible to make small or substantial changes. In general, we want to know how the candidate is doing, how much work is done, and what is left.
About the PhD candidate and his research
Mustafa Akay's educational background is in Sociology and History. He is interested in cultural history, historical anthropology, conceptual history, and temporality, with a particular emphasis on the early modern and modern Ottoman Empire and the transformation of historiography.
His current PhD project is on world histories written by historians of the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. He aims to investigate the semantic changes in concepts of universal history that are crucial for modernity and modern temporalities. His main question is what kind of temporal and spatial perceptions gave rise to modern narratives of universal history.
In order to understand this historiographical shift, he places an emphasis on the methodologies of intellectual history and conceptual history, and place more of a focal point on the interaction between the real world and the text. Transnational and global history approaches are also of interest to him. He focuses on concepts, ideas and translations that circulate with commodities and people in order to explore semantic transformations, especially during periods of increased global interaction.
His academic interests include the history of the Ottoman Empire, history of history-writing, universal histories, global history, intellectual history, conceptual history and temporality.