Oyunlar:

A three-part blogpost on forbidden video games, internet-bans in Turkey, with allusions to the history of games in Europe, and the separation of 'real' and 'virtual' worlds. Published at geekyapar.com

Drawing Cosmopolitan Pera, Drawing on Yusuf Bey’s Caricatures

Published in Youssouf Bey: Charged Portraits of Fin-de-Siècle Beyoğlu, edited by Bahattin Öztuncay, 63-79. Istanbul: Vehbi Koç Vakfı, 2016

Davutoğlu Türkiye’nin Said’i Değil, Bernard Lewis’i Olur

Hümanist, postyapısalcı, seküler, anti-emperyalist, teorisyen, İngiliz edebiyatı eleştirmeni ya da direnişçi, Said’in birbiriyle zaman zaman çelişen ve bu çelişkileriyle zenginleşen sıfatlarından hangisini alırsanız alın; neo-Osmanlıcı, Pan-İslamist, pragmatist, realpolitikci ve muktedir gibi, yine zaman zaman çelişen sıfatlara haiz Davutoğlu’na varamazsınız

The Case for Books, the Case for Libraries, the Case for Robert Darnton

A book review on Robert Darnton's The Case for Books (2009), published on the Anamed blog

Devletleşen Akp, Değişmeyen Devlet.

A co-authored piece on the transformation of the Turkish state under the Justice and Development Party Government

Doğanın “Kozmopolis”i: Terkos Suyolu Boyunca Kentliler, Köylüler ve Hayvanlar

2019'da yayımlanan “Nature’s ‘Cosmopolis’: Villagers, Engineers, and Animals along Terkos Waterworks in Late Nineteenth-Century Istanbul.” In The Seeds of Power: Explorations in the Environmental History of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Onur Inal and Yavuz Köse, 155-183 (Winwick: The White Horse Press, 2019) makalemin, kısaltılarak Türkçe'ye çevrilmiş hali. Toplumsal Tarih'in Aralık 2019 sayısında, Önder Eren Akgül'ün derlediği "Osmanlı'da Çevre, İklim ve İnsanlar" özel dosyasının içinde yayımlandı. K. Mehmet Kentel, "Doğanın “Kozmopolis”i: Terkos Suyolu Boyunca Kentliler, Köylüler ve Hayvanlar," Toplumsal Tarih 312 (Aralık 2019): 30-37

İstanbul İçin Halkın Adayı: "İşbilirliğe" Karşı Yerelde Örgütlenmek

An op-ed on the urban politics in Istanbul

Tarihçilik, Gazetecilik, Retorik: Diasporaya Tarih Anlatmak

An op-ed on Justin McCarthy's 2011 lecture at the London School of Economics. Published at the web news portal, Bianet.org

Caricaturizing “Cosmopolitan” Pera: Play, Critique, and Absence in Yusuf Franko's Caricatures, 1884–1896

This article explores a unique series of caricatures made between 1884 and 1896 by Yusuf Franko Kusa, a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and a vener- ated member of n-de-siècle Pera’s high society. Yusuf Franko’s hitherto unstudied caricatures were comparable to contemporary European caricatures in style, but their subject matter was very local, as he exclusively represented the elite networks that built and enjoyed “cosmopolitan” Pera, one of the central districts of late Ottoman Istanbul, in his art. These caricatures were never published, but bound as an album by the artist himself and circulated among Yusuf Franko’s entourage, members of elite society of Pera. Through close scrutiny of Yusuf Franko’s drawings and especially of the absences in them, the article provides a visual mapping of Pera’s social topogra- phy and explores what images can show that is sometimes ignored in textual sources. It is argued that the satirical form and the inter-visual references employed by Yusuf Franko to represent his inner circle promise to unravel the complexities embedded in Pera’s society, with more nuanced criticisms towards his fellow elite members than the conventional literature on Pera. Yusuf Franko appears not only as an illustrator of urban life in n-de-siècle Pera, but also an active participant in the making of this urban life through his playful acts of elite community-building, i.e., the informal and underground circulation of the images within high society. This article thus attempts to show one particular way in which visual sources can be treated as historical agents themselves, as well as serving as sources for (urban) history-writing

Empire on a Board: Navigating the British Empire through Geographical Board Games in the Nineteenth Century

While board games had been around for millennia, their popularization as a market commodity, with specilal themes and branding, had coincided with the formation of the global dominance of the British Empire as a maritime juggernaut. Early board game producers in the second half of the eighteenth century were mapmakers, and the board games shared many of the epistemological and material tenets of the Enlightenment cartography and the business of Empire. This paper argues that through its structural and narrative formation, geographical board games proved to be the quintessential imperial entertainment for the middle-class British children especially in the first half of the nineteenth century. With the transformation in the imperial discourse and imperial forms, board games came to change through the end of the century as well