Nil Palabiyik

Dr. Nil Palabiyik is a Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Queen Mary University of London's School of English and Drama. She holds an MA from the University of York and a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on the intellectual and material exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, particularly through book history, manuscript culture, and the study of oriental languages. She has held fellowships at institutions including the John Rylands Research Institute (Manchester), Scaliger Institute (Leiden), and Herzog August Library (Wolfenbüttel), and was a Humboldt Fellow at LMU Munich.

Her teaching includes undergraduate modules on Renaissance literary culture, The Thousand and One Nights, and medieval love poetry, as well as a postgraduate module on textual production. Her recent monograph Silent Teachers: Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in Early Modern Europe (2023) examines Ottoman-European scholarly collaboration, earning a British Academy Book Prize nomination. She is currently writing a trade book on the first Greek printing press in Constantinople (1627–28).

Her research has been funded by the British Academy and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, with publications in Lias, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. She engages in public scholarship through blogs for the Rylands Library, Biblia Arabica, and Elsevier Connect.