Dilek Oztoprak is an Adjunct Lecturer at MESAAS (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies) Department at Columbia University and AMESALL (African Middle Eastern South Asian Languages and Literature) Department at Rutgers University.

Dilek Oztoprak received her bachelor’s degree in History from Marmara University in Istanbul in 1997. She earned her Master of Arts degree in History with a focus on Ottoman History and Ottoman Archives in 2002 from Fatih University, Istanbul. Master’s thesis focused on Judicial Records of Ottoman courts in the Princes Islands in the 1860s. She studied court records of legal cases between Muslim and Non-Muslim residents of the islands.

Dilek had taught History in Turkey for four years. She also taught Turkish to grade-level students and adults in the United States between 2002 to 2016.

She has been teaching Turkish in Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced levels at Rutgers University-New Brunswick since 2014. In addition, she is teaching Reading in Ottoman Texts at Columbia University.