Dr Hande Altinay
Postdoctoral Associate Member
hande.yalnizoglu@history.ox.ac.uk
Leave to Supplicate Granted: May 2026
Research Topic: Governing Epidemics: Ottoman Rule in Baghdad, 1840-1880
Situated at the crossroads of imperial, medical and environmental history, my doctoral research, “Governing Epidemics: Ottoman Rule in Baghdad, 1840-1880”, examines Ottoman modernisation through the governance of epidemics in a nineteenth-century borderland context. It conceptualises the public health infrastructure in the major province of Baghdad as a transimperial space made up of Ottoman, European and Qajar empires that were entangled and engages with key themes in the history of medicine including the role of public health in the evolution of the modern state; changing frameworks of disease etiology; and the role of technological change on framing and governing epidemics. My broader research interests include global/connected histories of public health and epidemiology; transimperial networks of medical knowledge; and interdisciplinary collaborations between history, the broader humanities and scientific disciplines to enrich past accounts of disease, medicine and health.
In July 2026, I was co-convenor of the workshop "Plague in the Nineteenth-Century: Epidemiological and Epistemological Connections" which brought together historians, scientists, epidemiologists and anthropologists to explore a neglected, yet critical phase of plague activity that connected the Middle East, India, and Russia. (https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/plague-in-the-nineteenth-century-epidemiological-and-epistemological-connections)
In 2025, I was co-convenor of the TORCH Medical Humanities workshop at the Faculty of History, which brought together doctoral researchers and early career scholars to share research, receive feedback and network.
Over the past six years, I taught widely across Oxford including in the Faculties of History and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as well as the Stanford and University of Georgia study abroad programs. I tutored undergraduate students in the subjects "Middle East in the Age of Empire, 1830-1970" and "Ottoman History, 1300-1700".
My doctoral research was generously supported by the Hadid Scholarship of the Middle East Centre/St. Antony's College; the Arnold, Bryce and Read Fund Research Studentship of the Faculty of History; and the Sir Richard Stapley Trust.
I was Mercator-IPC Fellow at Istanbul Policy Center/Sabanci University in 2023-24.
I completed the MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford in 2016. Before coming to Oxford, I worked for a number of years in international non-profit organizations as well as the Turkish parliament and spent a year studying Arabic in Cairo, Egypt.
Featured Publication:
“The Making of an Ottoman Quarantine Post: Baghdad’s Quarantine Infrastructure, 1848-1865” Journal of Turkish Studies (Harvard University), 2022.