Biography
David Leupold is a historical sociologist, a scholar of post-Soviet and post-Ottoman memory politics, and winner of the CESS Book Award based in Berlin at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and Humboldt University, respectively. He holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from the Chair of Comparative Political Systems of Eastern Europe (Humboldt University of Berlin).
He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, the principal investigator of his own third-party funded research project, and the author of two monographs Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian and Kurdish Homelands (2020, with a foreword by Ronald G. Suny) and The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and Their Afterlives (2026). His research has been translated to multiple languages including Armenian, Kyrgyz, Russian and Ukrainian. Currently, he is pursuing his qualification for full professorship (habilitation) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
During his fellowship, Leupold explores perceptions of Central Asia and the Caucasus in Ottoman travelogues (seyahatnâme) and their discursive afterlives in TĂĽrkiye’s present-day relationship with the region(s). Marrying historical sociology and memory politics with late-Ottoman historiography and the history of imperial shatter zones, he wants to understand the intricate interplay of multiple overlaying discursive prisms – civilizing mission, pan-Islamic unity, and Turkish urheimat – that had informed Ottoman travelers’ gaze upon the waning “Empire’s East”.