Ezgi Cakmak

Biography

Ezgi Cakmak completed her Ph.D. in Africana Studies and History departments at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022. Before joining the history department at Towson University in 2024, Dr. Cakmak was a postdoctoral associate at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University and affiliated with the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers — Newark. Her research interests include African slavery in the late Ottoman Empire, the construction of black identity, and the legacy of slavery in the early Turkish Republic, along with African diaspora studies in the Middle East. Dr. Cakmak is currently working on her book manuscript tentatively titled “Citizens of a Silenced History: The Legacy of African Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic, 1857-1933,” which explores the processes, ideas, and affects that constructed the entangled histories of blackness and slavery before the end of the empire and in which ways these currencies traveled to the republican setting. Before her doctoral studies, she worked in international migration and conducted fieldwork with African migrants in Istanbul.

Selected Publications

• Cakmak, Ezgi. Siyah=yabanci=göçmen: Afrikali göçmenlerin Istanbul deneyimine dair bir okuma in Gocler Ulkesi, ed. by Lülüfer Korükmez and Ilkay Südas, (Istanbul: Ayrinti Yayinlari, 2015)
• Cakmak, Ezgi. Enslavement Practices in the 19^thCentury Ottoman Empire. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2025) forthcoming
• Cakmak, Ezgi. Entangled Histories of Africanness and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire.  History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Meltem Toksoz (London: Routledge, 2026) forthcoming

Selected Presentations

• Cakmak, Ezgi. ‘Real slaves’ of the Empire: Entangled histories of Africanness and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire. Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) 2023.
• Cakmak, Ezgi. Reminders of the Imperial Nostalgia: Encounters with Blackness in Early Turkish Republic. Afro-Asia Interactions, NYU Center for Global Asia, 2023.
• Cakmak, Ezgi. The Roots of the Silence. Encounters with blackness in Early Turkish Republic. Keyman Modern Turkish Studies, 2021.
• Cakmak, Ezgi. Sound like Turkish, look like Turkish: Reading Surname Law through the case of Afro-Turk community. Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) 2017

Research

• African diaspora
• History of slavery in the Middle East

Honors and Awards

• Benjamin Franklin Fellowship
• Vartan Gregorian Fellowship

Professional Memberships / Affiliation

• MESA
• ASWAD

Professional Service

• “Proposition for Global and Interdisciplinary Black Studies Symposium,” Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, April 11-13, 2024, Rutgers -Newark. Organizer
• Middle East Studies Association- 2022 Nominating Committee