Murat C. Yildiz
Murat C. Yıldız is a historian of the modern Middle East. His research and teaching
interests focus on the intersections of sports, popular culture, subject formation,
the body and gender, intercommunal relations, and urban history in the Middle East.
He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and
served as a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University
of Michigan. He was awarded numerous research and writing grants, including from Fulbright-Hays/IIE,
Mellon-Council for European Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the
Institute of Turkish Studies, Skidmore College, in addition to fellowships from the
University of California, Los Angeles.
Yıldız's forthcoming book, “The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Ottoman Istanbul” (The University of Texas Press), tells the story of the role played by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sports aficionados in the making of a shared sports culture in Istanbul during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His next book project, tentatively entitled “Making a Global Brotherhood: The Young Men’s Christian Association Between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey,” examines the emergence and spread of the YMCA in Istanbul in order to explore the centrality of associational life in reconfiguring gender norms, communal boundaries, and leisure time during a tumultuous (and uncertain) political period.
His have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, the Arab Studies Journal, the Cairo Papers in Social Science, and AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies as well as in other venues such as The Nation, Jadaliyya, and B|ta’arof Magazine. He is an assistant editor for the Arab Studies Journal, and formerly served as a board member of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.
Yıldız’s courses at Skidmore are built around the idea that history matters and that cultivating a historical approach to understanding the past and present helps students become more creative thinkers and informed citizens of an interconnected global community. He teaches survey courses on the Middle East, as well as upper-division courses on the history of sports, leisure and pleasure, communal boundaries, the body, and gender and sexuality in the Middle East.