Ayşe Hilal Uğurlu started her PhD in the History of Architecture program at Istanbul Technical University. She spent a year as a visiting special student in the Aga Khan Program at Harvard University during the 2009-2010 academic year, auditing several courses from the History of Art and Architecture Department as well as the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In 2012, she completed her dissertation entitled “Selim III’s Istanbul: Building Activities In The Light Of Political and Military Transformations”.

 

In 2014, she received a senior fellowship from ANAMED (Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations) at Koç University for her project titled “Imperial Mosque Courtyards as Social Nuclei of Istanbul”. The later stages of this project, focusing on the 19th-century imperial mosques and their changing spatial relations with the city, were also supported by Salt Research and the Istanbul Research Institute. She also received a Barakat Trust Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Khalili Research Centre, Oxford University (2017–18), and Barakat Trust Major Awards (2018–19) with her project: “A Reformist Sultan in the Age of Revolutions: Politics, Art and Architectural Patronage of Selim III (r. 1789–1807).” 

 

She co-edited two books with Dr. Suzan Yalman. The first, entitled 'Sacred Spaces + Urban Networks,' was published in 2019, and the other, entitled 'The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics,' in 2020.

 

Her research interests encompass the social, political, and architectural history of the Ottoman Empire. She is currently engaged in a project that explores the roles and influences of the empire's royal women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This project delves into their material and socio-cultural lives, as well as their international standing, with the aim of uncovering their often-underestimated significance in the empire's power dynamics and administrative structure. A preliminary phase of this project is slated for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2025.