Prof. Emrah Safa Gürkan completed his Ph.D. in 2012 at Georgetown University with a dissertation entitled “Espionage in the 16 th century Mediterranean: Secret Diplomacy, Mediterranean go-betweens and the Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry”. In addition to a number of articles in English, Turkish, Italian, Spanish and German, he wrote two monographs: Tongues for the Sultan and Pirates for the Sultan. While the first of these received the Scientific Monograph Award by Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA), Gürkan himself was given two more awards in 2018: The Outstanding Young Scientist Award by Turkish Academy of Sciences and the Promising Scientist Award at 14 th Kadir Has Awards. He penned two more books which became instant best-sellers, having sold more than 100.000 copies. His work has been translated in Hungarian, Russian, Ukranian and English.

Prof. Gürkan has produced numerous popular history programmes and served as historical advisor to TV series and documentaries, most recent of which was the Rise of Empires: Ottoman on Netflix.