Sevde Bolat is a Ph.D. candidate of Ottoman Studies at Istanbul Medeniyet University and works as a Research Assistant for the ERC-funded project, CAPITALEAST at UCD. She received her bachelor’s degree in history and a double major in international relations. After graduation, she continued her education at Ibn Haldun University, where she completed an MA program in Turkish Studies. At Ibn Haldun University, she worked as a Teaching Fellow for core courses “History of Modern Turkey I&II” and “Humanity and Society I&II”. She wrote her MA thesis, “Social Darwinism in the Unionist Theory and Practice: The German Connection,” under the supervision of Professor Halil Berktay. In her thesis, she focused on Social Darwinism as a subtle yet powerful aspect of the Unionist mentality and explored how and why this ideology seeped into their ideology. She received her MA in 2021 and was accepted into Istanbul Medeniyet University’s International Ottoman Studies PhD Program. She has been a research assistant in the Department of History at the same university since 2023. Currently, she is working on her thesis titled “Date Trade and Translocalization of the Iraqi Rural Space in the Age of Globalization”, supervised by M. Talha Çiçek.