Major new funding from the European Research Council to the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of FORTH
Saffet Hülya Canbakal, Professor of History as Network Faculty at Sabanci University and Affiliated Member of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS) of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), has been selected for funding from the competitive European funding program ERC Advanced Grant 2025. Hülya Canbakal’s project, entitled “Gender inequality in the Eastern Mediterranean: From early modern to modern, 1650-1900” (GINIE) is an ambitious project that aims to generate a map of gender regimes in the extended eastern Mediterranean in 1650-1900 and to examine the spatial, economic, social and cultural correlates of these regimes as well as their dynamic relation with early modern and early industrial economic change.
The project will construct an unprecedented database containing approximately 150,000 probate inventories and a wide range of complementary archival sources, including notarial records, land surveys, censuses, and provincial yearbooks. These materials will allow researchers to reconstruct patterns of wealth ownership, demographic structures, literacy, family organization, and social status for both women and men across multiple regions and communities. At the heart of the project lies the development of a new analytical tool: the Historical Gender Gap Index for the Eastern Mediterranean (HGGI-EM). Inspired by contemporary gender inequality indicators while adapted to historical sources, the index will measure gender disparities across four major dimensions: physical well-being, economic power, human capital, and social status. By combining multiple indicators within a single framework, researchers will be able to compare regions and periods systematically and to identify both long-term continuities and historical transformations.
ERC Advanced Grants are among the most competitive in Europe. Researchers receive competitive funding to help them explore their most innovative and ambitious ideas, conducting cutting-edge research across all scientific disciplines. These grants are awarded under Horizon Europe, the EU's research and innovation program. The Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas has the largest number of ERC-funded projects in Greece. The Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas is the only Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Greece with 10 projects funded by the ERC since 2017.
Saffet Hulya Canbakal obtained her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 1999. Her dissertation was awarded Honorable Mention in Social Sciences by the Middle East Studies Association of North America. She worked at Sabanci University as Associate Professor of History until 2017. She continues her research career as an affiliated researcher at Sabanci and IMS-FORTH (since 2023). She is the author of Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: ‘Ayntab in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2006) as well as numerous articles on topics related to the social and economic history and legal culture of the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period.
Canbakal is specialized in the socioeconomic history and legal culture of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. Her recent work focuses on long-term economic change, property relations, and different forms of inequality. She has published a monograph on political and legal culture in the Ottoman provinces and several articles in prestigious journals. She spent 2004-2005 as a fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient and Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin as part of the project ‘Merchant Cities’. She has designed and directed two team projects supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. One of the major outputs of the first project titled the ‘Distribution of Wealth in the Ottoman Empire’ was a dataset of Ottoman probate records, which comprises about 18,000 inventories from different parts of the Ottoman Empire and is the largest digitized collection of probates in the field. Since 2023, she has been working on gender relations in Ottoman Crete developing and testing the analytical model that will form the backbone of her new ERC project
