Esma Karadag

Esma Karadag is a PhD candidate at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. She will be at the African Studies Centre Leiden as a guest researcher for a period of 12 months.

She is a Turkish Ministry of National Education (MoNE) scholarship holder, teaching at Hacettepe University, Ankara. In May 2022, she was a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, an internationally recognised textbook research centre. She obtained her MA in History from the University of Cape Town (2017), with a dissertation titled: “Late Ottoman Perspectives on the South African War (1899-1902): the Work of Ismail Kemal Vlora.”

Her doctoral research is an interdisciplinary study encompassing African studies and education. The research aims to contribute to contemporary intellectual thoughts and debates within the framework of Pan-Africanism, as a form of nationalism, by investigating how Pan-Africanism is taught in these institutions and how it is perceived by teachers and students. She is currently working on a research project on Sudanese and Tanzanian textbooks, which is supported by the Turkish Maarif Foundation.