Merih Erol is an Assistant Professor at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. She is a historian specializing in the late Ottoman Empire, particularly in the study of nationalisms and ethnic and religious identities. She is the author of Greek Orthodox Music in Ottoman Istanbul: Nation and Community in the Era of Reform (Indiana University Press, 2015), an expanded and revised version of her PhD dissertation. Her monograph has recently been published in Turkish with the title Osmanlı İstanbul’unda Rum Ortodoks Musikisi: Reform Çağında Ulus ve Toplum. Dr. Erol also worked on the evangelization of the Ottoman Christians by American missionaries during the 19th century and published a few articles on this topic. She is currently working on the Armenian refugees in Greece after 1922. Recently, the University of Vienna awarded her both the Andreas Tietze Fellowship (Department of Near Eastern Studies) and the Tsiter-Kontopoulou Fellowship (Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies). In summer of 2021, she conducted research in Athens, as holder of a resident researcher grant by l’École française d’Athènes.

She has taught a broad range of subjects including World History (ca.1400-1945), the late Ottoman and modern Turkish history, history of the Balkans, and the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire. In 2014–2015, she was Onassis Foundation Visiting Faculty in the History Department of Boğazici University. In 2012–2013, she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She speaks English, German, Greek, French, and western Armenian.