Görkem Akgöz, PhD is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Her empirical research concerns the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey.

Her book, In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-building and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s.

She is a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History, the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, and the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network. 

For the past decade, Görkem has published in the field of contemporary history and sociology, besides teaching at top universities in the US and Europe. In February 2017, she was forced to flee her home country, Turkey, overnight, leave her tenure position, and move to Europe because of her political activism in light of a growing authoritarian streak that brought unwelcome attention from the state. She has since successfully held post-doctoral research positions, developed new directions in her research program, published in world-class academic journals and prestigious edited volumes, published a monograph, organized international workshops and conferences, and further strengthened her professional and intellectual networks.