Dr. Erdem Uçar
Erdem Uçar

Working on the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Silk Road: pre-Islamic and Islamic Turkestan, and the history of the Uyghurs and the peoples of the Eurasian steppe.

Focused on Old and Middle Turkic linguistics: from the runic inscriptions of the Orkhon valley to Old Uyghur Buddhist and Manichaean manuscripts. My work spans historical Turkic lexicography, the transmission of Turkic writing systems, and digital humanities, building OCR, TEI, and OpenSearch infrastructures for historical text corpora. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Old Turkic Studies (JOTS), with over 150 publications across philology, linguistics, and digital scholarship.

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Research Interests

  • Languages, literatures, and cultures of the Silk Road
  • Pre-Islamic and Islamic Turkestan: culture, society, and religion
  • History of the Uyghurs and the peoples of the Eurasian steppe
  • Old and Middle Turkic linguistics and philology
  • Pre-Islamic Turkic literature
  • Old Turkic Buddhism and Uyghur Buddhist literature
  • Uyghur Manichaeism and its textual traditions
  • Turkic lexicography and historical Turkic lexicography
  • History and development of Turkic writing systems
  • Transcription and transliteration problems in historical Turkic languages
  • Digital humanities and computational approaches to Old Turkic studies
  • TEI-based modelling of historical dictionaries and text corpora
  • OCR, text normalisation, and corpus workflows
  • OpenSearch-based dictionary and research data infrastructures
  • Language education and social participation
  • Intercultural education and diversity

Journal of Old Turkic Studies

JOTS journal cover

Franz Steiner Verlag · Published since 2017

I founded JOTS in 2017. Nine volumes were published on DergiPark between 2017 and 2025; from 2027 onward the journal is published in print and online by Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart.

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Latest

Forthcoming

Handbook of Old Turkic Literatures

Uçar, E. & Laamann, L. P. (eds.). Handbook of Old Turkic Literatures. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Brill. ISBN 978-3-11-226792-9.

A comprehensive handbook co-edited with Lars Peter Laamann, currently in preparation.

2026

New article on Ötäg

Uçar, E. (2026): Ötäg: ein wirtschaftlicher und politischer Terminus aus Runentürkisch (Bilgä Qaγan Inschrift, Ostseite 39). Central Asiatic Journal. 69/1 (forthcoming).

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