Önder Eren Akgül is a historian of capitalism, political economy, and the environment in the Modern Middle East. He received his Ph.D. in History at Georgetown University in 2022. Born and raised in Turkey, he completed his undergraduate degree in International Relations at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and his M.A studies in History at Sabancı University in Istanbul.

Dr. Akgül’s research examines how capital articulates itself in imperial law and orders, and local economic and ecological lives. His work focuses geographically on the Eastern Mediterranean, including the Aegean, Anatolia, and Greater Syria, drawing on Ottoman, Turkish, Arabic, and Greek-language archives.

He is currently working on his first book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Order of Dispossession: Crisis, Empire, and Capital in the Ottoman Commercial Heartland. The book examines the history of global capitalism, empire, and dispossession in Greater Izmir (Smyrna) – the port city of Izmir and its Western Anatolian rural hinterland – during a period characterized by economic, fiscal, and ecological crises at multiple scales, spanning from the 1870s through the end of the empire and into the afterlives of the post-Ottoman world. It illustrates that the Ottoman Empire survived the period marked by crisis through loans from European credit markets, which, in turn, necessitated a socio-legal order rooted in austerity, violence, and dispossession in the empire’s commercial heartland. This research ultimately offers a study of the post-1870s period as one of monumental ruptures in economic and ecological lives, imperial orders, and global capitalism.

Dr. Akgül is also developing his second book project, Ottoman Austerity. It explores the Ottoman roots of austerity and its lived experience across the empire. By zooming in on the Ministry of Finance’s everyday work as well as the economic lives of Ottoman society across the empire, this research investigates the development of an austere state after the 1870s, shaped by the empire’s fiscal crisis, the search for credit in European financial markets, and aspirations for balanced budget.

Dr. Akgül’s research has been published in journals, including but not limited to Comparative Studies in Society and History and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. At the University of South Carolina, Dr. Akgül teaches Middle Eastern history and Global Studies. Before joining the University of South Carolina in Fall 2026, he was the 2024-2026 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Prior to this, he taught Core Humanities at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, and International Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.