Hüseyin Serdar Tabakoğlu earned a doctorate from the University of Istanbul for his thesis on Ottoman-Spanish rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1560−1574: organisation, naval power and war (2016) and teaches Naval History, History of the Mediterranean World, and Ottoman History at Kırklareli University. During his stint as visiting researcher at the Instituto de Historia del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), he worked in the archives of the Museo Naval (Madrid) and the Archivo General de Simancas. He has focused on the naval organisation of the Ottoman and Spanish empires from a comparative approach and is the author of several studies on Spanish-Ottoman relations, among them 18. Yüzyılda Osmanlı-İspanya İlişkileri (2011), Deryadaki Ateş: Barbaros Hayreddin (2018) and Akdeniz’de Savaş: Osmanlı-İspanya İlişkileri (2019).