Management Group

The strategy and operation of the Oxford Birsöz Initiative is overseen by a management group, consisting of the Director and the Academic Board.

Leyla Najafzada – Director

Leyla is the founder and current Director of the Oxford Birsöz Initiative. Previously she was Director of BFSAC, during which time she oversaw the establishment of the ONGC, a dedicated research centre for the study of Azerbaijan, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Alongside her role as Director of Birsöz, she is the founder and administrator of the ONGC and works as an Azerbaijani language teacher for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. 

Dr Emine Çakır – Senior Lecturer in Turkish Language, AMES

Emine is Lecturer in Turkish at the University of Oxford. She has more than 25 years of experience teaching Turkish and other languages in Turkey and the UK, and is the author of numerous publications on teaching, language pedagogy and Turkish generally. She completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics/Language Pedagogy.

She taught at SOAS from 2007 until joining the Turkish Department at Oxford in 2013.  She has won several awards for her teaching since then, including two Oxford Students' Union Teaching Awards in 2019 for Outstanding Tutor and Exceptional Feedback, and two Awards for Excellence from the Humanities Division in 2015 and 2019.

She has taught Azerbaijani grammar since 2020. 

Nicholas Kontovas – Nizami Ganjavi Subject Librarian for the Caucasus and Central Asia, Bodleian

Niko is a linguist specialising in (but not limited to) Turkic and Iranian languages, with a disciplinary emphasis on sociohistorical linguistics and language contact. He has worked on a number of periods, from the Middle Ages to the present, and on topics ranging from the evolution of new verb forms in Central Asian Turkic to the use of language in identity maintenance among US drag queens. He has over a decade of experience teaching university courses in Turkish, Ottoman, Old Uyghur, Modern Uyghur, sociolinguistics, language and ethnicity, and Central Asian history. He has also acted as webmaster for a number of online language databases and learning tools, and devoted a large portion of his career to the development of open-source materials for the teaching and learning of less commonly taught languages.

He believes in socially responsible scholarship, and the duty of researchers to engage the public and make high-quality science approachable.

Professor Aslı Niyazioğlu – Associate Professor in Ottoman History, AMES

Aslı is an early modern Ottoman historian working on talismanic antiquities, dreams, gardens, and urban history. She returned to Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies in 2017, where she had previously served as a departmental lecturer, after nearly a decade at Koç University, Istanbul. Prior to that, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard.

She is currently working on two book projects on the role of imagination in the making of urban communities of the early modern Istanbul. The first explores the Ottoman interest in Istanbul’s columns, obelisks, and statues as occult objects. For many Ottoman writers, Istanbul’s antiquities were not irrelevant remains of a distant past, as often assumed, but had significant uses for the present. Drawing on the research for the ERC-funded project Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition (https://ghost.ims.forth.gr/), her book explores what we miss when we neglect their stories as mere repetitions of folkloric tales. My second book project on Istanbul’s history is a short monograph on the gardens of poets in sixteenth-century Istanbul commissioned by CUP for their History of Constantinople series. In dialogue with scholarship on poets’ gardens in different cities of the early modern world, it examines the interplay between the real and imaginary and shows the ways in which gardens and their stories opened spaces of transformation for the sixteenth-century Ottoman literati. 

Professor Zeynep Yürekli – Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, KRC

Zeynep specializes in Ottoman studies, though her research interests cover the late medieval and early modern Turco-Mongol Islamic world in general, extending to Iran, Central Asia and India. In particular, her research focuses on aspects of architecture, cult of the saints, hagiography, historiography and illustrated manuscripts.