Anthropology and History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2015

History of Modern Turkey, Atatürk Institute, Boğaziçi University, 2006

Electronics and Communication, Istanbul Technical University, 2004

Bornova Anadolu High School, 1999

history of anthropology of Turkey, philosophy of history, Cold War social sciences, American anthropology

HIST 201-202 - Modern Türkiye Tarihi I-II

HUM 307 - The City: The Experience of Urban Life

Dr. Ali Sipahi received his BSc degree in Electronics and Communication from Istanbul Technical University in 2004. He pursued his academic career in social sciences and obtained his MA degree in History of Modern Turkey from the Atatürk Institute at Boğaziçi University. He completed his PhD in anthropology and history with the dissertation titled “At Arm’s Length: Historical Ethnography of Proximity in Harput” at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2015. In 2013-14, he spent the academic year in Berlin as a visiting scholar at Zentrum Moderner Orient. In Summer 2015, he taught in the Department of Sociology at Koç University, Istanbul. Since 2016, he has been teaching at Özyeğin University, where he worked as the Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences between 2019 and 2024.

Dr. Sipahi’s graduate work focused on the urban history of Elazığ-Harput as a medium to uncover the social transformation in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the last two centuries. He was interested in urban transformation, trans-regional migration and collective violence. He co-edited The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century (I.B.Tauris, 2016). Dr. Sipahi is currently working on American anthropologists research in Turkey in the 1960s. Moreover, he is in the editorial board of the Toplumsal Tarih Akademi: Osmanlı-Türkiye Çalışmaları Dergisi and is the HOAN's Correspondent for the History of Anthropology in Turkey.

In 2022, Dr. Sipahi received Science Academy’s Young Scientist Award (BAGEP).

In 2024, he is accepted to TÜBİTAK's (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Programme) with his project on "American Anthropology of Turkey during the Cold War". At the same time, he was awarded with the Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher and Gerda Henkel Stiftung research grants.

Latest Publications:

• “An ethnographic moment in Turkey during the long 1968: Anthropologist portraits from the Chicago Circle and beyond,” BEROSE: International Encyclopedia of the Histories of Anthropology, 2024.
• “How to be a Good Guest? American Ethnographers in Cold War Turkey,” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 30:1 (March 2024): 133-149.
• “Antropolog Lloyd A. Fallers’ın 1960’lardaki Türkiye Çalışmaları,” folklor/edebiyat, no. 116 (November 2023): 1129–1150.
• “The Making of a National City: From Harput to Elazığ,” in Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey, ed. by Joost Jongerden. New York: Routledge, 2022, 63–74.
• “In pursuit of intellectual discovery: an interview with Michael E. Meeker,” New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 65 (2021): 100–119.
• “Başka bir dünya onu merak etmekle başlar: Marshall Sahlins’in ardından,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 156 (2021): 166–184.
• “Ethnographic authority and public culture in Turkey in the 1950s,” History and Anthropology, 32, no. 3 (2021): 381–403.
• "Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People’s Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 62, no. 4 (October 2020): 810–835.
• CSSH Behind the Scenes: "'Battle of Agencies' Released," March 1, 2021.