Murat C. Yildiz

Murat C. Yıldız is a historian of the modern Middle East. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of subject formation, the body and gender, intercommunal relations, urban history, and popular culture in the Middle East. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and served as a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He was awarded numerous research and writing grants, including from Fulbright-Hays/IIE, Mellon-Council for European Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute of Turkish Studies, Skidmore College, in addition to fellowships from the University of California, Los Angeles.  

Dr. Yıldız's current book project examines the making of a shared physical culture among Muslims, Christians, and Jews of late Ottoman Istanbul. His writings have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, the Arab Studies Journal, the Cairo Papers in Social Science, and AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies as well as in other venues such as The Nation, Jadaliyya, and B|ta’arof Magazine. He is an assistant editor for the Arab Studies Journal, and formerly served as a board member of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

At Skidmore, Dr. Yıldız teaches survey courses on the Middle East, as well as upper-division courses on the history of gender and sexuality, leisure and pleasure, the body, and intercommunal relations. Many of these courses are cross-listed with the Gender Studies Program and International Affairs Program. Dr. Yıldız is committed to bringing together learning inside and outside of the classroom, by organizing lectures, class trips to museums, film screenings, as well as other activities.