Görkem Akgöz, PhD is a post-doc researcher at re:work (IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History) of Humboldt University and a lecturer at Orientalisches Seminar at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. 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 modern history from a cross-disciplinary, comparative, and increasingly global perspective, besides teaching at top United States and Turkish universities. 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, written a book manuscript (forthcoming from Brill), organized international workshops and conferences, and further strengthened her professional and intellectual networks.