Asst. Prof. Rukiye Aslıhan Aksoy Sheridan

Asst. Prof. Rukiye Aslıhan Aksoy-Sheridan is on sabbatical research leave from February to September 2026, during which she will be a visiting researcher at the Department of Near Eastern Studies (Institut für Orientalistik) of the University of Vienna (Universität Wien). She will resume her regular teaching and other academic duties upon her return.

     Aksoy-Sheridan has been teaching common core courses at TED University since February 2016, in the areas of world literature, children’s literature, critical thinking and writing, introduction to cultural studies, world history, and introduction to humanities, all of which she designed or redesigned. She served as a full-time Lecturer from February 2019 to May 2022, and has held the position of Assistant Professor since May 2022. She also serves as coordinator of the introduction to humanities and literature courses within the Common Core Programme.

     Before joining TED University, she worked as a part-time instructor at Bilkent University between 2014 and 2017, and taught intermediate and advanced Ottoman Turkish at the Ankara Branch of the History Foundation of Turkey (Tarih Vakfı).

     Aksoy-Sheridan received her B.A. in Western Languages and Literatures from Boğaziçi University in 2000 with high honors. She earned her M.A. from the same department in 2003 with a thesis titled “The Embowelled Brain: The Carnivalesque in the Works of Jonathan Swift and Flann O’Brien,” examining the Irish comic tradition.

     During her undergraduate and graduate studies at Boğaziçi University, she studied in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as part of an inter-university exchange program (1999), and served as a founding research assistant at the Mithat Alam Film Center at Boğaziçi University (2000–2003). Between 2004 and 2006, she worked as a translator and simultaneous interpreter on EU-funded civil society projects.

     She received a second M.A. in Turkish Literature from Bilkent University in 2009 with a thesis titled “Textual Ambivalence in the Narratives of Ahmet Mithat Efendi,” and completed her Ph.D. in History at Bilkent University in 2016, specializing in early modern Ottoman history, with a dissertation titled “A Study of Pseudo-Historical Ottoman Narratives of the 17th–18th Centuries: Envisioning an Imperial Past and Future in the Ottoman Social Imagination and Memory.”

     During her doctoral studies, she was a Junior Residential Fellow at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in 2012–2013, conducting archival research on Ottoman multi-text manuscripts held at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul. She also received training in Ottoman epigraphy through the joint Koç University–University of Chicago Summer Program (2014), and attended workshops in various fields of digital humanities at the University of Oxford (DHOxSS, 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2022).

     Aksoy-Sheridan has presented papers and delivered invited talks at conferences organized by institutions including the University of Vienna and Cambridge University, and has published research articles in national and international peer-reviewed and indexed journals.

     Her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period, with particular emphasis on 17th-century Ottoman multi-text manuscripts in the form of personal notebooks (mecmû‘as), memory studies, and the production and consumption of oral and written culture from a comparative perspective.

Degrees
•    B.A. in Western Languages and Literatures, Boğaziçi University, 2000
•    M.A. in English Language and Literature, Boğaziçi University, 2003
•    M.A. in Turkish Literature, Bilkent University, 2009
•    Ph.D. in History, Bilkent University, 2016