Şule Aksu is a PhD candidate at the School of History at University College Dublin. She earned her bachelor’s degree in History from Istanbul University. After graduation, she continued her studies at Istanbul Medeniyet University, where she completed her MA programme in International Ottoman Studies. She wrote her MA thesis, “The Functioning of the Administrative Judiciary in the Province of Damascus Within the Framework of a 1549 Mehâyif Inspection Register,” under the supervision of Güneş Işıksel. In her thesis, she focused on the mechanisms of interaction between the Ottoman central administration and the provincial administration throughout the inspection register to shed light on the administrative, legal, and socioeconomic structure of 16th-century Damascus. Currently, she is working on her thesis titled: “From Local to Global: Settled Tribes of Leja in the Age of Capitalism and Globalisation, 1860-1918,” supervised by M. Talha Çiçek, and is part of the ERC-funded project, CAPITALEAST.