I am a PhD student in Asian Studies. I completed my MA in History at Boğaziçi University in August 2018, where I wrote a thesis entitled “From Belief to Religion: Understanding the Gion Festival as a Politico-cultural Phenomenon” focusing on the ideological development of the concept of religion in Japan through a case study of the Yasaka/Gion Shrine in the city of Kyoto. Currently I am working on Japanese media and popular culture, with particular interest toward anime, manga, video games, and the mixed media industries that maintain the connection between these media forms. More specifically, how narratives in pop cultural products operate as parts of historically relevant ideologies and how they become politicized in the modern world are key questions that I aim to answer in my dissertation. In a more general sense, my research interests include the history of Japan from a broad perspective, as well as the history of thought, economic history and religion.