Asli Niyazioğlu is an associate professor of Ottoman history at the University of Oxford. She began her research on Ottomans and their world with a PhD from Harvard, followed by a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and an assistant professorship at Koç University, Istanbul. Her scholarship focuses on the role of imagination in the making of urban communities in early modern Istanbul. In her first book, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul (Routledge, 2016), she explored how the narration of dreams provided Ottoman biographers with a means to form learned communities in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Currently, she is working on her second book project on Ottoman stories about Istanbul’s antiquities from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Building on the recent research on the afterlives of Byzantine monuments and histories of the Islamic occult, she examines why Ottomans wrote about ancient columns and statues as powerful talismans and why they urged their readers to pay attention to their many uses for the urban life.