Fatma Öncel

Senior Researcher

Dr. Fatma Öncel is an expert in Ottoman social and economic history, with a focus on rural history, the land question, and the Balkans. She is a faculty member at Bahçeşehir University’s Center for Ottoman Studies (BAU-OTAM) and an affiliated researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). She is also a trustee of the Tarih Vakfı (History Foundation) and a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed academic journals Turkish Historical Review and Toplumsal Tarih Akademi. Dr. Öncel’s research examines the impact of tax, labor, and property institutions on Ottoman political and economic regimes, as well as the use of digital methods to approach Ottoman archives and data ethics. She completed her Ph.D. in History at Boğaziçi University in 2018, with a dissertation on agrarian relations and estate agriculture in Ottoman Thessaly. She has received the Brill Publishing’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Early-Career Paper Prize and has published in leading journals such as the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, International Review of Social History, and Middle Eastern Studies. Dr. Öncel co-leads the data modeling and analysis for Charting the Ottoman Empire, bridging technical processes with historical insights. She oversees the development of digital tools that integrate historical research with digital techniques. Additionally, Dr. Öncel manages data structuring, ensuring the seamless integration of diverse sources and datasets within the project.