Arif Erbil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Brown University. His research lies at the intersection of early modern Ottoman intellectual and legal history, Islamic manuscript cultures and the history of knowledge, with a particular focus on empire and language, translation, insha (the art of prose writing), chancery practices and the movement of texts across the wider Islamic world. He holds an M.A. in History from Brown, an M.A. in Religious Studies from Duke University and an M.A. in History from Boğaziçi University, where he completed his thesis on translation and juristic discourse in sixteenth-century Ottoman political writing. He also holds a double-major B.A. in Political Science and International Relations and History from Boğaziçi University.

Arif's research examines the role of insha (the art of prose and letter writing) and its practitioners, munshis, in Ottoman empire-building between 1453 and 1583. By focusing on these overlooked scholar-bureaucrats, he explores how writing, correspondence, manuscript circulation and archival practices shaped imperial identity, administration and diplomacy. Situating the Ottoman Empire within broader Eurasian intellectual networks, his project traces connections with Timurid, Safavid, Mughal and Perso-Indian traditions, including figures such as Mahmud Gawan. Through archival and manuscript research in Turkey, Europe, Central Asia and India, he argues that early modern empire-building was not only a political and military process, but also a textual and transregional one.

Yılmaz Yeniler is a doctoral student in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World (JIAAW) at Brown University. His research interests include theoretical and methodological approaches to gender in archaeology, linguistic constructions of archaeological discourses, the history of archaeology and the socio-politics of the past. Regionally, his work focuses on the archaeology of ancient Southwest Asia and he has done fieldwork with multiple projects in Turkey.

Yılmaz's dissertation project, currently titled “Archaeological Knowledge at the Intersection of Race, Gender and Nationalism: A Comparative Analysis between Turkey and Greece,” examines how racial and gender stereotypes have shaped the production of archaeological knowledge and, in turn, how archaeological discourses have contributed to modern gender and race paradigms during the formation of the nation-state in Turkey and Greece. Through a comparative framework and a detailed archival research, his project offers a broader analysis of the epistemological and institutional foundations that inform the construction and dissemination of knowledge about the ancient past in modern nation-states.

Casey McLaughlin is a rising junior double concentrating in Middle East Studies and Slavic Studies. She transferred to Brown this semester, in part because her previous institution had no Middle East Studies or Arabic program, and is excited to pursue her interest in the ancient and modern Middle East at Brown.

Casey will use the research travel award to complete an intensive Arabic summer course at the University of Minnesota this summer. This program will provide the equivalent of a year of beginning Arabic, allowing Casey to start Arabic at the intermediate level at Brown next semester. At Brown, Casey plans to complete a thesis on American cultural memory of the Iraq war and emphasizes the importance of including non-American and non-English perspectives on the war in this work, with Arabic sources being most abundant and most relevant.