Furkan Caglan

Biography

Furkan Çağlan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the social, political, and urban history of the late Byzantine Empire. His research focuses on the transformation of cities in late medieval Anatolia, particularly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, with an emphasis on frontier dynamics, urban identity, cross-cultural interaction, and the relationship between political change and the built environment.

He received his B.A. in History from Middle East Technical University in 2022 and his M.A. in History from Bilkent University in 2025. His master’s thesis, Urban Transformation of Late Byzantine Anatolian Cities in the Thirteenth Century, examined the political, socio-economic, and spatial transformation of cities including Nicaea, Trebizond, Laodicaea, and Ephesos in the fragmented political landscape that followed the Fourth Crusade.

His doctoral research expands this work by exploring how cities across Byzantine Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean adapted to changing political structures, frontier conditions, patterns of mobility, and Byzantine-Turkish interaction. He is particularly interested in the ways cities negotiated continuity and change through institutions, local identities, material culture, and connections to wider Mediterranean networks. He also works on Byzantine-Seljuk and broader interreligious and cross-cultural encounters in the medieval Mediterranean. His research combines narrative and documentary sources with archaeology, material culture, and historical geography.

Originally from Bursa, Türkiye, his interest in cities has also been shaped by the multilayered archaeological landscapes of western Anatolia, particularly sites such as Nicaea, Ephesos, Laodicaea, Hierapolis, and Chonai.