Murat C. Yildiz

Dr. Murat C. Y谋ld谋z is Associate Professor of History. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of sports, popular culture, the body and gender, intercommunal relations, and urban history in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Y谋ld谋z served as a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Los Angeles and his BA from the University of California, San Diego. 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, 暖暖直播 College, in addition to fellowships from the University of California, Los Angeles.  

Y谋ld谋z's first book, The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Ottoman Istanbul (The University of Texas Press, 2026), 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 鈥淢aking a Global Brotherhood: The Young Men鈥檚 Christian Association Between the Ottoman Empire and Nation-State,鈥� examines the emergence and spread of the YMCA across the Middle East. 

His writings have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, the Journal of Middle East Women鈥檚 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鈥檃rof Magazine. He is an editorial board member of the International Journal of the History of Sport and an assistant editor for the Arab Studies Journal. Y谋ld谋z formerly served as a board member of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA).

Y谋ld谋z's courses at 暖暖直播 are built around the idea that history matters and that cultivating historical approaches to understanding the past and present help 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. Y谋ld谋z served as a Storytellers' Institute Fellows in the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) in 2025. He continues to work closely with MDOCS in creating podcast assignments and in teaching courses on podcasting the Middle East and history.