Burak Bulkan is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a visiting researcher at Utrecht University. His research lies at the intersection of late Ottoman history and the history of 19th-century international law.

His doctoral dissertation, titled Constrained Sovereignty: Ottoman Legalism and the Making of International Law, 1856–1878, examines how Ottoman statesmen, diplomats, and jurists utilized the emerging language of international law to challenge the Eurocentric civilizational hierarchy and defend claims of sovereign equality. The dissertation develops two analytical concepts, Ottoman legalism (the strategic use of legal arguments to limit European intervention) and constrained sovereignty (the conditional form of statehood resulting from this), and argues that the Ottoman Empire was not merely a recipient of 19th-century international law categories but also, to some extent, a shaper of them.This dissertation is developed over a period spanning from the Treaty of Paris of 1856 to the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, focusing on three main case studies: the 1860–61 Mount Lebanon and Damascus Civil Conflicts, the 1866–1869 Cretan Revolt, and the 1876 Bulgarian Uprising.

His broader areas of interest include the critical history of international law, 19th-century empires, imperialism and colonialism, and Ottoman legal and diplomatic history. He earned his Bachelor’s degrees in History and Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University. He completed his Master’s degrees in Modern Turkish History at the Atatürk Institute at Boğaziçi University and in Global and Comparative Politics at the University of Essex. He also teaches courses on the history of the Ottoman Empire and the history of the modern Middle East at UNC Chapel Hill.