Yiğit Akın is Associate Professor and Carter V. Findley Professor of Ottoman and Turkish History at the Ohio State University. He is a specialist of the history of the modern Middle East. His research interests include social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, with a particular focus on the First World War and its aftermath, war and society, nationalism, and social movements.

Akın is the author of two books. The first, Gürbüz ve Yavuz Evlatlar: Erken Cumhuriyet’te Beden Terbiyesi ve Spor (‘Robust and Vigorous Children’: Physical Education and Sports in Early Republican Turkey) (İletişim, 2004), offers a new framework for thinking about the relationship between sports and physical education, governmentality, public health, and nationalism in early republican Turkey. It won the 2005 Distinguished Young Social Scientist Award from the Turkish Social Science Association.

His second book, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans' Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, 2018), examines the Ottoman Empire’s catastrophic experience of the First World War and analyzes the impact of the war on the empire’s civilian population. When the War Came Home was named a 2018 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title and won the 2019  Tomlinson Book Prize for the best work of history in English on World War One, awarded by the World War One Historical Association.

Akın is currently working on two book projects on the post-World War I years in the Ottoman Empire from a global perspective and the social and cultural history of death in the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey.