Ummugulsum Kurukol

Ummugulsum is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research explores Muslim travel writing across different genres and periods, asking how travellers understood their journeys, explained their motives, and experimented with the language of travel. She works closely with Arabic and Ottoman Turkish texts and is interested in travel not only as movement across space but also as a form of religious practice, self-presentation, and curiosity about the world.

Her PhD focuses on a comparative study of Abū Ḥāmid al-Gharnaṭī and the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi. She examines how their motivations, curiosities, and personalities shaped their writing styles and their choice of stories, and how their works reflect both continuity and change within Muslim travel writing. Themes such as religious symbolism, visits to the Holy Lands, encounters with ‘the unfamiliar’, and narratives of wonders form the main framework of her research. Through these themes, she traces how Muslim travellers from different regions and centuries imagined their connection to a wider Islamic world and to God’s signs in creation.

She completed her MA in Islamic Studies at SOAS. For her dissertation, she prepared an English translation and analytical study of Lisān al-Dīn Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s travel memoir to Málaga and Salé. This work deepened her interest in Muslim travellers and their relationship with intellectual and literary traditions. More broadly, she is interested in pre-modern geography, cosmography, and adab, as well as questions of belonging, memory, and emotion in narrative sources and travel accounts.

She holds a BA in Theology from Marmara University in Istanbul, during which she also completed a classical Ottoman madrasa curriculum. She works with sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and English. Alongside her academic research, she enjoys creative writing and keeps personal notebooks of her own travels and everyday life, which helps her reflect on the same questions and emotions she traces in historical travel accounts.

• Kurukol, Ummugulsum(2024). Paper Presentation' How Evliya Çelebi dreamed the travel tradition?' Medieval Books across Borders, 14 September 2024. Bookscapes Workshops by CHASE. University of Kent, Cantenbury, UK.
• Kurukol, Ummugulsum(2022). Speaker, Yunus Emre Institute Talk for Young Seminar Series by Yunus Emre Institute with the title of 'Memoirs of an Exile: An Andalusian Historian's Travelogue of Malaga & Salé'.
• Kurukol, Ummugulsum(2022). Paper Presentation. 'Interpretation of Islamic Travel Writing: Notion and Motivations'. Graduate Colloquium in Ottoman Studies 2020 (Online), 26 September 2020. Ali Vural Ak. Centre for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University and The Institute of Middle East and Islamic Countries Studies at Marmara University, Turkey.