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Abdurrahman Atçıl

Sabanci University

Abdurrahman Atçıl is Associate Professor of history at FASS. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2010 and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Law School, he taught at Queens College of the City University of New York and later at Istanbul Şehir University. He joined Sabancı University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in 2020. His main areas of interest are law, politics, religion, bureaucracy, and education in the early modern Ottoman Empire, and he has published on subjects including the relationship between philosophy and law in the Islamic legal tradition, the diverging attitudes of Islamic scholars in the Ottoman–Safavid confrontation, and law during the Mamluk–Ottoman transition. His first book, Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Dr. Atçıl was awarded the Turkish Academy of Sciences’ (TÜBA) award for outstanding young researchers (GEBİP) in 2015 and the Science Academy’s award for young researchers (BAGEP) in 2018. He is also one of a few scholars ever in Turkey to receive a prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, awarded in 2020 for his ongoing project “OTTOLEGAL—The Making of Ottoman Law: The Agency and Interaction of Diverse Groups in Lawmaking, 1450–1650”.