Fatma Oncel

Dr. Fatma Öncel is an expert in Ottoman social and economic history, with a focus on rural history, the land question, and the Balkans. She is a faculty member at Bahçeşehir University’s Center for Ottoman Studies (BAU-OTAM) and an affiliated researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University during the 2018-2019 academic year. She is also a trustee of the Tarih Vakfı (History Foundation) and a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed academic journals Turkish Historical Review and Toplumsal Tarih Akademi.

Dr. Öncel’s research examines the impact of tax, labor, and property institutions on Ottoman political and economic regimes, as well as the use of digital methods to approach Ottoman archives and data ethics. She completed her Ph.D. in History at Boğaziçi University in 2018, with a dissertation on agrarian relations and estate agriculture in Ottoman Thessaly. She has received the Brill Publishing’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Early-Career Paper Prize and has published in leading journals such as the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, International Review of Social History, and Middle Eastern Studies. 

As a project executive of the Mapping Ottoman Epirus Project, Dr. Öncel focuses on land tenure, taxation, debt and credit relations, agrarian management, and proto-industrialization under Ali Pasha's rule.