Murat Cankara majored in history and theory of theatre. He received his PhD, in Turkish literature, from Bilkent University with a dissertation titled “Empire and Novel: Placing Armeno-Turkish Novels in Ottoman/Turkish Literary Historiography” where he focused on the novels written by Ottoman Armenians in the Turkish language using the Armenian script between 1850 and 1870. He was a Fulbright visiting fellow at Harvard University, in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, in the academic year 2007-2008 and a 2012-13 Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he gave a course on Armeno-Turkish texts. He is currently a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Social Sciences University of Ankara and is particularly interested in the nineteenth-century literary culture of the Ottoman Empire (and elsewhere), encounters between Armenians and Muslim/Turks, the appropriation of Turkish language by Armenians, the non-Muslim press, and Ottoman/Turkish literary historiography.