Research
My work sits at the intersection of comparative historical sociology, nationalism studies, and development. I draw on mixed methods — combining historical GIS, statistical inference, and qualitative case analysis — to examine how large-scale institutional legacies shape political and social outcomes across generations.
Nation-Building and Minority Policies
A central strand of my research examines how states construct national identity and manage ethnic and linguistic diversity. This work is anchored in the ETHNICGOODS project, an ERC Consolidator Grant led by Prof. Matthias vom Hau at IBEI. My contributions focus on theorising and measuring variation in nation-building strategies across regime types and world regions.
Together with project collaborators, I am co-developing the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) Dataset, a cross-national dataset covering 163 countries across five policy domains — education, language, citizenship, symbols, and cultural institutions — scheduled for public release in 2026. Related work develops a novel typology of diversity governance that moves beyond the assimilation–accommodation binary dominant in the literature.
Recent publications in this area include:
- Amasyalı, E. & Tarasov, A. (2025). Nation-building in the wake of empire: Identifying patterns of minority policies in the aftermath of Soviet collapse. Nations and Nationalism, 1–16.
Ottoman and Missionary GIS
My doctoral research reconstructed the competitive dynamics between Protestant missionary institutions and Ottoman state education in late Ottoman Anatolia (c. 1880–1914). Using a purpose-built historical GIS dataset covering 335 kazas, I traced how inter-communal educational rivalry — particularly between ABCFM missionary schools and Armenian community schools — shaped long-run patterns of human capital accumulation, women’s schooling, and economic development in modern Turkey.
The underlying data infrastructure — including manually digitised kaza boundary polygons, geocoded missionary station locations, and digitised Ottoman school census records — is publicly available in the repository below.
Recent publications drawing on this dataset include:
- Amasyalı, E. (2022). Indigenous Responses to Protestant Missionaries: Educational Competition and Economic Development in Ottoman Turkey. European Journal of Sociology, 63(1), 39–86.
- Amasyalı, E. (2022). Protestant Missionary Education and the Diffusion of Women’s Education in Ottoman Turkey: A Historical GIS Analysis. Social Science History, 46(1), 173–222.
Computational Text Analysis
An emerging line of research applies computational methods to the study of nationalist discourse. Current work uses large-scale text analysis to examine how national identity, ethnic boundaries, and historical memory are narrated in school textbooks across conflict-affected contexts. A project on Turkish history textbooks uses topic modelling and word-embedding techniques to trace shifts in nationalist framing across curriculum reform cycles.