Before joining Yale, Ozgen Felek was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2013-2016), and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University (2011-2013).
In addition to Ottoman Turkish, her teaching and research interests include literature, gender, sexuality, and Sufism in the Ottoman Empire. Felek is also an accomplished artist of Islamic illumination and miniature painting. She has been painting since 1989, and has taught this art at the Fırat University Youth Educational Center (FUGEM) in Turkey, at Community High School in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University. In her work, she combines modern performing arts and Islamic literature in order to introduce the major literary works of Islamic literature to students and non-specialist audiences in the Western world. The performances she produced can be seen in the following website: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~felek/beautyandlove/
She is currently working on a monograph on Sultan Murad III and a book project on the construction of manhood and masculinity in the Ottoman court. With Prof. Walter G. Andrews, she translated the dream letters of the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (r. 1574-1595) into English. The first 100 letters were published digitally under the title, “The Sultan’s Dreams Project,” as part of the Newbook Digital Texts Project, which can be reached via the following link: http://depts.washington.edu/ndtwp/sultansdreams/
