Murat Özkan was born in Gebze in 1986 and is originally from the İspir district of Erzurum province. He completed his primary, secondary, and high school education in the Darıca district of Kocaeli. He graduated in 2009 from the Department of History at Samsun Ondokuz Mayıs University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Ordu. In the same year, he began his master’s education in the Department of General Turkish History at the Institute of Social Sciences of Ordu University. In 2011, he was appointed as a Research Assistant to the Department of History at Ordu University, and in 2012 he completed his master’s degree with the thesis entitled “Transcription and Evaluation of the Russian Ahkam Register No. 87/5 (pp. 1–95),” earning the title of Master of Science. He began his doctoral studies in 2013 at the Department of History, Institute of Social Sciences, Sakarya University, and successfully completed them in 2017 with his dissertation entitled “A Russian General in the Tsarist Russia’s Occupation of Turkestan: Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev.” Between 2015 and 2016, he served for one year as a visiting researcher at Ural Federal University in Russia in order to conduct his doctoral research. He received the title of Associate Professor in 2020. Özkan currently works at the Department of History at Ordu University. He is married and has one child. He has published numerous articles in various academic journals, primarily on the Turkestan khanates, Russian military history, and the social life of Turkestan. Özkan, who knows Russian and English, is the author of the books “Bukhara Through the Eyes of the Russian Traveler Burnashev in the Age of Exploration of Turkestan,” “The White General Skobelev (1843–1882) in the Age of the Occupation of Turkestan,” “The Khanate of Bukhara (1500–1920),” “The Khanate of Khiva (1511–1920),” “Chronicles of the Siberian Khanate I–II–III,” “Istanbul Travelogue (Journey to Ottoman Lands with Russian Travelers in the 19th Century),” and “İspir Population Register (1835).”