Mehmet Darakcioglu

Mehmet Darakcıoglu is a historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. He completed his PhD at Princeton University and his dissertation examined the employment of government translators and the establishment of the Translation Bureau, which became the forerunner of the Ottoman Foreign Ministry. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned a joint master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied US foreign policymaking during the Johnson administration. At Princeton, he received the Ertegün Graduate Fellowship, and at the University of Texas, he was awarded the Iranian Studies Scholarship.   Mehmet’s research and teaching interests include social and intellectual history, dissemination of information, imperial bureaucracies and institutions, and linguistic diversity in the Ottoman Empire. He is also interested in international relations and language policies across the world. Topics of courses he taught at Penn include diversity in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Turkish. He also taught language courses at Princeton and at New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center.   Before joining Gallatin, Mehmet served as associate director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he played a leading role in the renewal of the US Department of Education’s Title VI grant, which provided funding for national resource center programming and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships for the grant cycle 2014 through 2018. He also spearheaded collaborative programs in global education with schools of education and with minority-serving institutions, developed academic events and curricula, led outreach efforts, and managed other federal funds and fellowships.