Visiting scholar Mahsun Atsız conducts research on Old Turkic and Sogdian manuscripts

Mahsun Atsız has been a visiting scholar at CERES since June 2025. His one-year research stay is funded by the renowned Tübitak International Research Fellowship Program for PhD Students, which supports promising doctoral students from Turkey in their international research projects.

Mahsun Atsız is currently working as a research assistant at Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey and is simultaneously pursuing his doctorate at Istanbul University in the Department of Old Turkish Language. His research focuses on Old Turkic and Sogdian language and writing culture, with a particular emphasis on manuscript studies and codicology. In addition, he is particularly interested in Old Uyghur fragments, Sogdian manuscripts, and questions of syntax, morphology, and the history of concepts in Central Asian source texts.

His publications to date have focused on topics such as the role of female terms in Old Turkic, the syntactic analysis of Old Turkic texts, and the translation of Sogdian legal texts from Russian into Turkish. Thanks to his profound linguistic competence—in addition to Turkish and Kurmanji, Atsız has knowledge of Persian, Chinese, French, German, and Syrian—he brings a broad philological expertise to his research, which is strongly interdisciplinary in nature.

During his stay at CERES, Mahsun Atsız will continue to develop his dissertation and exchange ideas with colleagues on historical language contacts, religious text traditions, and material writing cultures.