Esma Karadağ

Esma Karadağ has completed her doctoral studies at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, funded by the Turkish Ministry of National Education (MoNE) through her academic affiliation with Hacettepe University in Ankara. She is currently an externally funded postdoctoral researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden, working on a research project on Eastern and South African social sciences textbooks, supported by the Ankara-based Africa Foundation.

In May 2022, she was a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute, an internationally recognised textbook research centre in Braunschweig, Germany. She earned her MA in History from the University of Cape Town in 2017, with a thesis titled 'Late Ottoman Perspectives on the South African War (1899–1902): The Work of Ismail Kemal Vlora'.

Her academic work lies at the intersection of African studies and education. Her doctoral research investigated how Pan-Africanism - as a contested discourse shaped by historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts - is represented in South African history classrooms. The study examines its teaching, the perceptions of educators and students, and how school socioeconomic conditions affect its representation within the broader context of social cohesion.