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 holds a PhD in History from the Ohio State University (2019), and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the American University in Cairo (AUC), and Princeton University. Prior to her joint appointment at 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).
Gülşah has offered a variety of courses at the Ohio State and Koç Universities including Women and Gender in Literature, Sociology of Gender, History of Modern Sexualities, History of the Modern Middle East, Islam, Politics and Society in History, and World History from 1500 to Present. Her research has been supported by awards and fellowships from several sources, including the Fulbright Fellowship and the Adıvar Fellowship in Ottoman and Turkish Studies as well as the Genevieve Brown Gist Dissertation Research Fellowship at the Ohio State University.
Her current book project, A Comparative History of Feminism in Egypt and Turkey, 1880-1935: Dialogue and Difference investigates the interaction between organized women’s movements in Turkey and Egypt, and their relation with global women’s activism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on two years of archival research in Turkey, Egypt, and the United Kingdom, her project establishes a dialogue between Turkish and Egyptian feminisms, compares nationalist versus Islamic trends among them, and takes stock of their interactions with and resistances to western feminisms. By bringing the evolution of the feminist discourse in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in conversation with the secular and religious reform traditions in both countries in a comparative perspective, her work seeks to encourage a broader and more in-depth understanding of feminism in the Middle East, stripped from the dominant, nationalist narrative of its evolution.