Kitapçı Bayrı, Buket 

Independent Scholar

Research Topic: Romans, Rums, Kafirs. Identity Transformation in Late Medieval Anatolia and the Balkans

Dr. Kitapçı-Bayrı earned her PhD degree from Université de Paris 1/Panthéon-Sorbonne and University of Boğaziçi (2010-cotutelle program). She has articles on late medieval Byzantine martyrdom narratives and on the perception of Byzantium in modern Turkish popular cinema and literature. She currently works on an article on food, feast and fasting as identity markers in late medieval Anatolia. She has been teaching at Bilgi University as an adjunct assistant professor since 2011. She also taught courses on Byzantine history at Yeditepe and Boğaziçi Universities.

Her ongoing project, Romans, Rums, Kafirs. Transformation of Identity in Late Medieval Anatolia and in the Balkans, at RCAC aims to revise her (honors) doctoral dissertation into a monograph. Through a close reading and deconstruction of both the Byzantine martyrdom narratives and the Turkish-Muslim frontier narratives as well as narratives recounting the lives of the dervishes, which have been until now studied only in terms of the transformation of the religious component of the Byzantine (Roman) identity, she argues that this religious component to be inseparable from the political and territorial components of both Byzantine and Turkish Muslim self-identifications. Apart from political and territorial markers of the Byzantine and the Turkish Muslim identity, she also puts emphasis on the cultural markers such as food, commensality and fasting.