A. Hilal Uğurlu started her PhD in the History of Architecture program at Istanbul Technical University in 2005. She spent the 2009-2010 academic year as a visiting special student in the Aga Khan Program at Harvard University and completed her dissertation entitled “Selim III’s Istanbul: Building Activities In The Light Of Political and Military Transformations” in 2012.

In 2014, she received a senior fellowship from ANAMED (Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations) at Koç University for her project titled “Imperial Mosque Courtyards as Social Nuclei of Istanbul”. The later stages of this project, focusing on the 19th-century imperial mosques and their changing spatial relations with the city, were also supported by Salt Research and the Istanbul Research Institute. She also received a Barakat Trust Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Khalili Research Centre, Oxford University (2017–18), and Barakat Trust Major Awards (2018–19) with her project: “A Reformist Sultan in the Age of Revolutions: Politics, Art and Architectural Patronage of Selim III (r. 1789–1807).” 

She co-edited three books, first entitled Ottoman Architectural Culture (2016) with Prof Hatice Aynur and the next two books Sacred Spaces + Urban Networks (2019) and  The Friday Mosque in the City: Liminality, Ritual, and Politics (2020) with Dr. Suzan Yalman.

Her research interests encompass the social, political, and architectural history of the Ottoman Empire. She is currently working on a project, with Dr. Deniz Türker, that explores the roles and influences of the empire's royal women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This project delves into their material and socio-cultural lives, as well as their international standing, with the aim of uncovering their often-underestimated significance in the empire's power dynamics and administrative structure. The first phase of the project, which will be supported by the MEF University Scientific Research Projects fund between 2023-2025, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.