Gülşah Şenkol 

 

 

 

 

Gülşah Şenkol is a historian of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, specializing in comparative women’s history in the Middle East. Currently, she is a lecturer in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) at Koç University. She earned a PhD in History from the Ohio State University, and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the American University in Cairo (AUC), and Princeton University. Prior to joining Koç University, she held postdoctoral and research fellowships at ANAMED (2019-2020; 2022-2023), the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (Fall 2020), and Orient-Institut Istanbul (2020-2021). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK (AHRC).

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At Koç University, she teaches courses focused on the literature and histories of women and gender in the Middle East. Her current book project, titled Gender Politics: A Comparative History of Feminism in Turkey and Egypt from the Late Ottoman Empire to the 1930s, is based on two years of archival research conducted in Turkey, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. This project establishes a dialogue between Turkish and Egyptian feminisms, exploring both secular and Islamic trends within these movements, and examining their interactions with and responses to Western feminisms. Her book demonstrates how contemporary interpretations of feminism and feminist activism in Turkey and Egypt have been significantly influenced by the feminist discourse and practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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