Transcending Boundaries: The Ottoman Empire, Europe, and the Mediterranean World, 1500 - 1800

FAIN: FS-231189-15

St. Mary's College of Maryland (St. Mary's City, MD 20686-3001)
Betul Basaran (Project Director: February 2015 to February 2017)

A four-week seminar for sixteen college and university faculty on the Ottoman Empire and Mediterranean world in the early modern era.

The four-week NEH summer seminar offers college and university professors an opportunity to integrate stimulating approaches toward Ottoman, European and Mediterranean history. Recent scholarship problematizes the notion of a pre-modern world composed of isolated blocks in constant conflict with each other, promoting instead the idea of an uncentered transcultural region of intense interaction and exchange. This focus on global encounters urges us to revisit the role of the Ottoman Empire in European and Mediterranean history and to incorporate the latest insights into our research and teaching in the humanities. Indeed, when we move away from essentializing contrasts, Ottoman relations with the rest of Europe assume a startling character. Such a perspective reveals a relationship in which the ideological walls that seemed to divide Christian Europe from the Ottoman Empire instead become the framework to a rich and intricate web of interactions.