Onur İnal (Project Leader) is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of Vienna. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2015 with a dissertation on the urban and environmental history of Ottoman Izmir. He has served as a board member and the regional representative for Turkey at the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). He founded the Network for the Study of Environmental History of Turkey (NEHT) in 2017 and has managed it since then. His research focuses on the urban and environmental histories of the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. His monograph, Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Izmir, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His academic work appeared in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of World History, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Ottoman Studies, Journal of Urban History, Environmental History, and Environment and History.

Deniz Armağan Akto (Researcher) is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History of Bilkent University in Ankara. He received his M.A. from the Middle East Technical University with a thesis titled “Ottoman Fortresses and Garrisons in the Hungarian and the Eastern Frontiers (1578-1664).” His research focuses on the military and socio-economic history of the early modern Ottoman Empire. He is a member of the Early Modern Ottoman Studies (EMOS) group.