Nil Palabiyik

Dr Nil Palabiyik is a Research Associate in the John Rylands Research Institute, working on the Library’s Turkish Collections. She is a specialist in book history and printing culture of early modern period with an interest in the publishing of Byzantine and post-Byzantine theological texts in Europe, Greek printing in Constantinople and the printed book trade in the Ottoman Empire during the hand-press period.

She studied at the University of York and Royal Holloway, University of London where she completed her doctoral thesis on ‘Nicodemos Metaxas and the first Greek printing press of Constantinople (1627–1628)’. Nil has lectured at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University and been awarded research fellowships at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden University and Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel.

Her new project concerns the learning of Turkish for scholarly, diplomatic, religious and commercial purposes through the medium of manuscripts and printed books – Turkish language aids and reference works, including lexica, thesauri, grammars and phrasebooks produced in Europe for European consumption during the 16th-18th centuries.

Her recent publications are ‘An Early Case of the Printer’s Self-Censorship in Constantinople’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 16.4 (2015): 381-404 and ‘Redundant Presses and Recycled Woodcuts: The Journey of Printing Materials from London to Constantinople in the Seventeenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (forthcoming in 2016).