Mehmet Kentel is an urban environmental historian and curator. He works as an Assistant Professor of History and Urban Studies. He is currently preparing his first monograph, Urban Elements: Assembling Infrastructure and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul. His most recent exhibition is On the Spot: Panoramic Gaze on Istanbul, a History, which he co-curated for Pera Museum in 2023.

More information about Mehmet Kentel

I am an urban environmental historian and curator. I am an Assistant Professor at the Institute for History, a lecturer and the Programme Committee Chair of BA Urban Studies Programme. I received my PhD from the Near and Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Washington in 2018 and master’s degree from the Modern British and European History programme at Oxford University in 2011. My research focuses primarily on the environmental history of late Ottoman Istanbul and I am the editor-in-chief of YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies, the only peer-reviewed journal on Istanbul. I am currently preparing my first monograph, Urban Elements: Assembling Infrastructure and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul. I most recently co-curated the exhibition On the Spot: Panoramic Gaze on Istanbul, a History and co-edited the eponymous volume (Pera Museum, 2023). My work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, including Muqarnas, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and Urban History. My other exhibition credits include Memories of Humankind: Stories from the Ottoman Manuscripts (curator, Istanbul Research Institute, 2019) and The Characters of Yusuf Franko: An Ottoman Bureaucrat’s Caricatures (advisor, author, ANAMED, 2017). 

Before joining Leiden University I was the Research Projects Manager of the Istanbul Research Institute from 2019 to 2023, where, among other things, I organised Istanbul Unbound: Environmental Approaches to the City, a major interdisciplinary conference on Istanbul’s environment. I am also co-editing an edited volume based on this conference for Stanford University Press. My academic and curatorial work has been featured on television, radio, newspapers, and podcasts, and I have co-hosted a radio show on urban issues on Turkey’s leading talk radio station, Açık Radyo.

Fields of interest

Urban history, environmental history, infrastructure studies, Ottoman Empire, Middle East
 

Grants and awards

• 2024 Yavuz Sezer Memorial Article Prize for the article “Ruin and Knowledge in Pera: Discovering Istanbul’s Genoese Heritage in the Moment of Its Destruction.”

• 2023 Harvard University Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture Fellowship (declined due to the tenure track offer from Leiden University)

• 2021 European Society for Environmental History Research Grant

• 2021 Barakat Postgraduate and Early Career Award

• 2021 Koç University’s ANAMED Postdoctoral Fellowship

• 2021 Spatial Justice Association Research Award

• 2020 University of Vienna Andreas Tietze Memorial Fellowship in Turkish Studies

• 2018 “Distinguished Dissertation” by the UW Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies

• 2017 The Dr. Walter W. Ristow Prize Honorable Mention for the paper “Empire on a Board: Navigating the British Empire through Geographical Board Games in the Nineteenth Century”

• 2017 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Foundation Writing-Up Grant 2017 UW Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Award

• 2017 UW Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Schwartz Endowment Fellowship 2015 UW Simpson Center Summer Research Fellowship in Digital Humanities

• 2014 Koç University’s ANAMED Junior Residential Fellowship

• 2014 SALT Research Institute Research Grant

• 2012 UW Hall-Ammerer-Washington Research Foundation Fellowship

Selected publications

 “Ruin and Knowledge in Pera: Discovering Istanbul’s Genoese Heritage in the Moment of Its Destruction.” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World 40 (2023), 389–421. https://brill.com/view/journals/muqj/40/1/article-p389_11.xml

“ ‘Burnt panorama’: Forensics, Photography, and the 1870 Pera Fire” (w. Ahmet Ersoy). In On the Spot: Panoramic Gaze on Istanbul, a History, edited by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, K. Mehmet Kentel, M. Baha Tanman, 170–187 (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2023). https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/3718958

“Pera, Kasımpaşa, Sewers, and Maps: Representing Infrastructural Entanglements in the Nineteenth-Century Istanbul.” Journal of the Ottoman & Turkish Studies Association 8, no. 1 (Summer 2021): 405–414. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/845969/

“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 (translated to Turkish: İktidar Tohumları [İletişim, 2022]. https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl/stable/j.ctv289dv04.15

"Caricaturizing “Cosmopolitan” Pera: Play, Critique, and Absence in Yusuf Franko’s Caricatures, 1884–1896." Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2018), 7-32. https://www⁠.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jottturstuass.5.1.03

Activities