Oya Rose Aktaş is a PhD candidate in History. They are a scholar of gender and genocide in the Ottoman Empire, and their dissertation project is a relational history of Armenians and Jews in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic, examining liberal claims of inclusion, shared neighborhoods, religious conversions, mixed marriages, soldiering men, and orphaned children. Their local history projects include collaborating on mapping histories of racism and resistance on UW’s Seattle campus, and a digital map of Seattle’s first Ottoman settlers.

As a Digital Humanities Summer Fellow, Aktaş will map shared urban spaces of Istanbul and Seattle at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal the relational identities and encounters that were disrupted through state violence and migration. The Istanbul map focuses on Jewish and Armenian neighborhoods, and the Seattle map focuses on Turkey-born settlers (many of them Jewish and Armenian) in the Pacific Northwest.