Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu is a PhD candidate at Harvard University’s joint program in History and Middle Eastern Studies. He was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and received his BA in philosophy and political science from Princeton University in 2010. Balıkçıoğlu studies the intellectual history of the early modern Ottoman Empire and the greater Islamicate world with a specific focus on Arabic philosophical and theological texts produced in the fifteenth-century Ottoman Constantinople. After completing his research in various manuscript libraries in Europe and the Middle East, Balıkçıoğlu is currently writing his dissertation on the early Ottoman philosophical commentaries and glosses related to issues such as causality, free-will and agency. Balıkçıoğlu is also conducting a second research project on the expansion of religious bureaucratic apparatus in modern Turkey. He has also published six books of poetry and five books of translations from Iranian and American poetry in Turkish. Together with Sidney Wade, he prepared a selection in English from the œuvre of Turkish poet Melih Cevdet Anday (Talisman Press, 2017). He is currently working on the complete Turkish translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
