Tuğçe Akgül

University of Michigan

Thomas D. Seymour Fellow

Research Topic: Leaving Legacies: Social Reproduction, Posterity, and Contested Futures of Enslaved and Freed Women in Ancient Greece

Tuğçe Akgül is a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and currently enrolled in the Women’s and Gender Studies certificate program at the University of Michigan. Tuğçe received her B.A. in History from Boğaziçi University in 2018, followed by her M.A. from the same institution in 2021. She is a social historian specializing in Classical and early Hellenistic Greece, with research interests in gender, economy, and slavery. Her dissertation focuses on social reproduction, care labor, and the contested futures of enslaved and freed women in ancient Greece in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. Her work relies on textual, epigraphic, and material evidence to trace tensions, strategies, and negotiations over posterity, well-being, and futures of marginalized groups. During her time in Athens, Tuğçe hopes to progress further into her dissertation research, visit sites such as Delphi and Dodona, read more inscriptions, and learn Modern Greek.