Ottoman Cultures: Society, Politics and Trade in the Turkish Empire, 1299-1922

FAIN: ES-50494-12

Primary Source (Watertown, MA 02472-4052)
Deborah Cunningham (Project Director: March 2012 to March 2015)

Funding details:
Original grant (2012) $161,333.00
Supplement (2013) $11,772.00

A three-week institute for thirty school teachers on the Ottoman Empire to be held in Istanbul, Turkey.

Primary Source proposes a summer institute, Ottoman Cultures: Social, Political, and Commercial Interactions in a Dynamic Empire, to bridge the wide gap between recent academic scholarship and secondary school teaching by making Ottoman cultures central, and taking teachers to the heart of their world: Istanbul and its surrounding region. Using the concept of culture in its various definitions to highlight the empire's diversity, the course will explore and juxtapose the cultures connected with different types of historic sites, allowing a thematic approach to the study of Ottoman cultures on location. Our chief goal is that teachers will bring back to their schools the knowledge, motivation and resources to teach the Ottoman Empire in fresh ways that reflect the vibrant field that Ottoman studies has become; in doing so, they will fill a major curricular gap and significantly deepen students' knowledge of the Islamic world.