Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) will host a talk titled “The Alevi Archive Project: Recovering Marginalized Histories and Preserving Cultural Heritage.” The presentation introduces an ongoing digital humanities initiative dedicated to documenting and preserving the historical and cultural heritage of Alevi communities.
The project focuses on recovering dispersed and often overlooked archival materials related to Alevi history, belief traditions, and cultural practices. By bringing together manuscripts, historical documents, oral histories, and other sources, the initiative seeks to create an accessible digital archive that contributes to the study of Alevism and to the broader preservation of marginalized cultural heritage. Such archival efforts also open new possibilities for interdisciplinary research on religion, memory, and minority histories in the Middle East and beyond.
The Department of History and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies present
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump is Associate Professor of History at William & Mary. She received her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2008. Her research focuses on the socio-religious and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire, with particular attention to vernacular Sufism, nonconformist religious movements, and minoritized communities—especially Alevi-Bektashi communities in Anatolia and the Balkans, as well as the Ottoman-Safavid borderlands. She is the author of The Kizilbash/Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), based on newly uncovered private-archive sources.
Ozkan Karabulut
Ozkan Karabulut is a PhD candidate in the History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University. His research focuses on the early modern social, cultural, and religious history of the Ottoman Empire, Alevi-Bektashi communities, religious orders, and book history. He is currently writing his dissertation on the formation of the Alevi poetry corpus in Ottoman Anatolia by analyzing poetry notebooks preserved in the private archives of Alevi-Bektashi communities.
Yasemin Karakuş
Yasemin Karakuş is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Istanbul University, specializing in Old Turkish Literature and a visiting scholar at CMES. Her research focuses on classical Ottoman poetry and prose, cultural history, and the intersections of literature and intellectual traditions. As a TÜBİTAK postdoctoral fellow, she is currently working on the identification and classification of literary texts in the Alevi-Bektashi digital archive during her visiting scholarship at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
Contact: eaf073@fas.harvard.edu
Alevi Studies Network 