Biography
Yeliz Teber is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, and a Wolfson College non-Stipendiary Junior Fellow.
She is a cultural historian specialising in social networks, community formation, and material culture in the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a focus on marginalised and renunciatory dervish and ‘Alid groups such as the Bektashis, the Abdals, and the Kizilbash (known today as Alevis). The Bektashis and Alevis represent the second-largest ethno-religious community in present-day Sunni-majority Turkey, with smaller communities across the Balkans.
Teber completed her DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford in 2024, with a thesis entitled ‘A Sheikh Family in the Ottoman Empire: The Çelebis at the Convent of Hacı Bektaş, 1470s—1820s’. Her research investigated the history of the Çelebis, the preeminent Alevi-Bektashi sheikh family who directed the central convent of Hacı Bektaş (Turkey) throughout the Ottoman period. She has conducted over a decade of research, including extensive fieldwork in Turkey, Greece, Albania, and Romania, following her MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, from 2014 to 2016.
Her current project, ‘The Collection of the Hacı Bektaş Shrine: Writing Cultural History from the Margins’, examines the shrine’s manuscripts, illustrations, calligraphic panels, and daily and liturgical objects—the only surviving assemblage from an Alevi-Bektashi shrine dating to the Ottoman period. This work aims to provide the collection’s first contextual examination in Ottoman scholarship, exploring the formation and development of the Alevis-Bektashis.
Research Interests
Ottoman history and art history, Islamic material culture, Muslim minority groups in the Islamic world