Associated Products
Heritage Management, Central Lydia Archaeological Survey (Web Resource)Title: Heritage Management, Central Lydia Archaeological Survey
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: This website provides the grounding for Dr. Luke's focus on cultural and natural heritage policies of living landscapes in Central Lydia, Turkey.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.bu.edu/clas/activities/heritage-management/Primary URL Description: This page covers heritage management activities of the project and includes links to some of the resources developed by the project to highlight the local cultural resources.
Secondary URL:
http://www.bu.edu/clas/overview/landscape-environment/Secondary URL Description: This page describes the landscape and environment studies carried out by the project and projects related to heritage landscape preservation.
Archaeology, Central Lydia Archaeological Survey (Web Resource)Title: Archaeology, Central Lydia Archaeological Survey
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Abstract: The website covers the activities of the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey project, in particular, the currently active extensive survey and focus on the discovery of Bronze Age remains.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.bu.edu/clas/overview/archaeology/Primary URL Description: This page offers an overview of the archaeology of the Central Lydian region, and characterizes the patterns of habitation and livelihood.
Secondary URL:
http://www.bu.edu/clas/overview/fieldwork/Secondary URL Description: This page outlines the field activities that have taken place in each season.
Cultural Diplomacy in Action: U.S. Foreign Schools and Centers and the International Exchange of Ideas (Article)Title: Cultural Diplomacy in Action: U.S. Foreign Schools and Centers and the International Exchange of Ideas
Author: Morag Kersel
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: This brief editorial article discusses the role of research institutes in supporting local efforts to protect and manage cultural heritage resources.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/009346911X12991472410962Primary URL Description: Journal of Field Archaeology 36:3 (July 2011) 255-256
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Field Archaeology
Publisher: Maney Publishing
Conquest, Urbanization and Plague Networks in the Ottoman Empire, 1453-1600 (Book Section)Title: Conquest, Urbanization and Plague Networks in the Ottoman Empire, 1453-1600
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Editor: Christine Woodhead
Abstract: The Ottoman empire as a political entity comprised most of the present Middle East (with the principal exception of Iran), north Africa and south-eastern Europe. For over 500 years, until its disintegration during World War I, it encompassed a diverse range of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities with varying political and cultural backgrounds.
Yet, was there such a thing as an ‘Ottoman world’ beyond the principle of sultanic rule from Istanbul? Ottoman authority might have been established largely by military conquest, but how was it maintained for so long, over such distances and so many disparate societies? How did provincial regions relate to the imperial centre and what role was played in this by local elites? What did it mean in practice, for ordinary people, to be part of an ‘Ottoman world’?
pp. 86-110; N. Varlik adds a discussion of the wider Ottoman Empire and its interactions abroad in the context of the spread of disease.
Year: 2012
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/ottoman-world/oclc/773476372?referer=di&ht=editionPrimary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Ottoman World
ISBN: 978-0415444927
US Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (Book)Title: US Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage
Author: Christina Luke
Author: with Morag Kersel
Abstract: "Archaeology's links to international relations are well known: launching and sustaining international expeditions requires the honed diplomatic skills of ambassadors. U.S. foreign policy depends on archaeologists to foster mutual understanding, mend fences, and build bridges. This book explores how international partnerships inherent in archaeological legal instruments and policies, especially involvement with major U.S. museums, contribute to the underlying principles of U.S. cultural diplomacy. Archaeology forms a critical part of the U.S. State Department's diplomatic toolkit. Many, if not all, current U.S.-sponsored and directed archaeological projects operate within U.S. diplomatic agendas. U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology is the first book to evaluate museums and their roles in presenting the past at national and international levels, contextualizing the practical and diplomatic processes of archaeological research within the realm of cultural heritage." ~ Publishers website
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/us-cultural-diplomacy-and-archaeology-soft-power-hard-heritage/oclc/796001885&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: Worldcat entry
Access Model: book or e-book purchase
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Multi-author monograph
ISBN: 9780415645492
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Ottoman History Podcast Episode 117: Sufism and the Ottoman Empire (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast Episode 117: Sufism and the Ottoman Empire
Writer: John Curry
Writer: Nir Shafir
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: Sufism has played an important role in Muslim spiritual, intellectual, and political life since the earliest periods of Islam's spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In this episode, John Curry discusses the history of Sufism and its place during the Ottoman period, exploring the intellectual, political, and social dimensions of Sufi movements.
Date: 08/09/2013
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2013/08/sufism-ottoman-empire.htmlPrimary URL Description: link to podcast abstract and recording
Access Model: open access
Format: Web
Ottoman History Podcast Episode 148: Beyond Heterodoxy: Kizilbash/Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast Episode 148: Beyond Heterodoxy: Kizilbash/Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia
Writer: Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Writer: Chris Gratien
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: The history of Anatolia's Alevi or Kizilbash community has long been written by outsiders who have variously portrayed them as mysterious, heretical, heterodox, or uncivilized. Alevism has been often juxtaposed with the high religion would-be orthodox Sunni practice. This historical understanding of Alevis has continued to influence the way these communities are represented in the present. In this episode, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump challenges this binary. Drawing on previously unexamined sources produced by the Ottoman Alevi community itself, she seeks a new road to understanding Alevism and the relationship of Alevi communities with the Ottoman and Safavid states, Sufi movements of the time, and the communities that surrounded them.
Date: 03/08/2014
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2014/03/alevi-kizilbash-history.htmlPrimary URL Description: link to podcast abstract and recording
Secondary URL:
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/16852/alevis-in-ottoman-anatolia_an-interview-with-ayferSecondary URL Description: linked access via e-zine Jadaliyya
Access Model: open access
Format: Web
Statistics, Reform and Technologies of Government in Turkey (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)Title: Statistics, Reform and Technologies of Government in Turkey
Writer: Brian Silverstein
Producer: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Arizona
Abstract: Turkey’s application to enter the EU has required the country to learn new things about itself. It is required to learn them in specific frameworks, using specific concepts and methodologies, and these are subsumed in EU entry negotiations under the rubric of statistics. Having collected these statistics, it is required to share them with its population and the EU, and—crucially—it continually reforms its institutions and practices in light of the new statistical knowledge. This paper argues that the relationship between statistics and social forms is not solely one of “description.” To the extent that statistics do not merely study or represent the objects they are purported to be about, but are intimately involved in intervening in/on those objects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological processes) and in fact in remaking them through ‘reform’ and/or ‘development,’ they have a performative nature. In this sense statistics are less a methodology and more a technology--a technology of governance. The paper draws on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, technicians and agricultural experts working on the design and implementation of EU-inspired reforms to develop new apparatuses for the collection of data on agriculture in the country.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://cmes.arizona.edu/colloquium/sp14/silversteinPrimary URL Description: Colloquium access webpage
Secondary URL:
http://www.freenewspos.com/english/video/turkey/u6IqYTeEn9kSecondary URL Description: youtube access to video
Access Model: open access
Format: Video
Greco-Islamic Philosophy and Islamic Jurisprudence in the Ottoman Empire (1300-1600): Aristotle’s Theory of Sciences in Works on Usul al-Fiqh (Article)Title: Greco-Islamic Philosophy and Islamic Jurisprudence in the Ottoman Empire (1300-1600): Aristotle’s Theory of Sciences in Works on Usul al-Fiqh
Author: Abdurrahman Atcil
Abstract: Until the eleventh century, Islamic religious scholars had a cool attitude toward philosophy and Aristotelian logic. They considered the first as the reflection on issues related to religion on the basis of pure reason, and the second as its method. The point of departure for scholars was the scriptural texts, the Qur’an and Hadith (reports of the prophetic tradition). Thus, usul al-fiqh (theoretical jurisprudence) and other religious disciplines developed while having only a minimal relationship to the philosophical tradition and Aristotelian logic. However, after the eleventh century when philosophy and religious studies became mature, these two strands of knowledge interacted to such a degree that the distinction between them was gradually blurred. Those with a philosophical inclination adopted scholars’ major assumptions and produced works that could be considered a contribution to a particular religious discipline. Meanwhile, religious scholars studied and cited the works of philosophers, especially Ibn Sina (d. 1037), and also adopted their discursive language, concepts, proofs, themes, and methods.
In this essay, Atcil explores an aspect of the interaction by examining the conceptions of Islamic jurisprudence by scholars who lived in the Ottoman central lands from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. I contend that following and developing the approach of several Muslim theoreticians, they adopted Aristotle’s theory of sciences and presented Islamic jurisprudence as a science withthe standards of this theory. In their view, the edifice of Islamic legal knowledge was constructed via inferences based upon premises, the validity and certainty of which could be corroborated externally.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://english.isam.org.tr/documents/_dosyalar/_pdfler/osmanli_arastirmalari_dergisi/osmanl%C4%B1_sy41/2013_41_ATCILA.pdfPrimary URL Description: ISAM - Centre for Islamic Studies
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of Ottoman Studies
Publisher: Centre for Islamic Studies
“From ‘bête noire’ to ‘le mal de Constantinople:’ Plagues, Medicine, and the Early Modern Ottoman State” (Article)Title: “From ‘bête noire’ to ‘le mal de Constantinople:’ Plagues, Medicine, and the Early Modern Ottoman State”
Author: Nuket Varlik
Abstract: Ottoman perceptions of and responses to epidemic diseases changed dramatically in the sixteenth century. Until that time, plagues were viewed in mostly supernatural-apocalyptic terms. However, with the development of a new body of knowledge and interpretations, plagues came to be seen in a more naturalistic-medical framework. Moreover, this new approach was used for justifying administrative and legal practices implemented for the control of epidemic outbreaks. This article explores the historical context in which this paradigmatic change took place, with a view to establishing the complex relationship between the expanding powers of early modern state governance and the discourses of plagues maintained by the Ottoman society.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_world_history/v024/24.4.varlik.htmlPrimary URL Description: Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of World History
Publisher: University of Hawai'i Press
Gygaia Projects Website (Web Resource)Title: Gygaia Projects Website
Author: Kaymakci excavation/Gygaia project team members
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Abstract: This website is intended to provide public information as well as to serve as a home for collaboration, planning, discussion, etc., of all topics related to the primary initiatives of Gygaia Projects, most pressingly the 2014 season of the Kaymakçi Archaeological Project (KAP). The site is a work in progress that perhaps should always remain so, as we define, refine, and redefine various parts of our project(s).
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://sites.bu.edu/gygaia/Primary URL Description: Primary website of the Gygaia Projects
Cultural sovereignty in the Balkans and Turkey: The politics of preservation and rehabilitation (Article)Title: Cultural sovereignty in the Balkans and Turkey: The politics of preservation and rehabilitation
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: This article explores preservation and restoration projects in the Balkans and Turkey in light of current Turkish and American foreign policy initiatives. Of specific interest are the political goals of the Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA) and the United States Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation. The focus on the rehabilitation of Islamic heritage in the Balkans by the Republic of Turkey illustrates a strategic decision to weave cultural heritage programs into foreign policy as part of a larger agenda to increase its presence (and thus influence) abroad, notably under the arc of former Ottoman territories. This targeted approach in the Balkans differs in critical ways from the rhetoric of the United States and their partners in Europe and Turkey, which promote idealized notions of diversity, pluralism, and tolerance through a mosaic of heritage projects (Islamic, Jewish, Christian, museum displays, archaeological research, etc.). The Ambassadors Fund projects are staged in moral terms as part of reconciliation and EU integration. These patterns demonstrate the ability of cultural heritage projects to affect symbolic geographies of power; in so doing, heritage programs continue to offer viable and successful platforms in shaping claims of cultural sovereignty beyond the boundaries of nation-states.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://jsa.sagepub.com/content/13/3/350Primary URL Description: Sage Journals
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Social Archaeology
Publisher: Sage
Dwelling in Haciveliler: social engineering policies in the context of space, place, and landscape in rural western Turkey (Article)Title: Dwelling in Haciveliler: social engineering policies in the context of space, place, and landscape in rural western Turkey
Author: Elvan Cobb
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: The Gediz valley of modern, western Turkey is a major gateway linking the Aegean spheres with the central Anatolian plateau. The making of cultural heritage in Anatolia plays out in very different ways depending on the physical location of the community and the level of implementation of the post-1923 social- and political-engineering agendas of the authorities of the Republic of Turkey. In this case-study we analyse one community, a village of just under 200 people known as Haciveliler in the Marmara Lake basin of the Gediz valley in western Turkey (province of Manisa). We explore how this community continues to (re)define its heritage (from the 19th century to the present day) in light of contemporary policies. The approach combines historiographical, archaeological, preservation and ethnographical datasets.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://journals.cambridge.org/article_S0066154613000082Primary URL Description: Cambridge Journals
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Anatolian Studies
Publisher: British Institute at Ankara
Shifting Winds: Piracy, Diplomacy, and Trade in the Ottoman Mediterranean, 1624-1626 (Book Section)Title: Shifting Winds: Piracy, Diplomacy, and Trade in the Ottoman Mediterranean, 1624-1626
Author: Joshua M. White
Editor: Pascal Firges
Editor: Tobias Graf
Editor: Christian Roth
Editor: Gülay Tulasoglu
Abstract: Well-Connected Domains offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Ottoman Empire as deeply connected to the world beyond its borders by way of trade, warfare and diplomacy, as much as intellectual exchanges, migration, and personal relations.
While for decades the Ottoman Empire has been portrayed as largely aloof and distant from - as well as disinterested in - developments abroad, this collection of essays edited by Pascal W. Firges, Tobias P. Graf, Christian Roth, and Gülay Tulasoglu highlights the deep entanglement between the Ottoman realm and its European neighbors. Taking their starting points from individual case studies, the contributions offer novel interpretations of a variety of aspects of Ottoman history as well as new impulses for future research.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/890626219Primary URL Description: WorldCat permalink
Access Model: sale
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History
ISBN: 9789004266704
Plague, Conflict, and Negotiation: The Jewish Broadcloth Weavers of Salonica and the Ottoman Central Administration in the Late Sixteenth Century (Article)Title: Plague, Conflict, and Negotiation: The Jewish Broadcloth Weavers of Salonica and the Ottoman Central Administration in the Late Sixteenth Century
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: Like other port cities of the early modern Mediterranean, Ottoman Salonic was repeatedly attacked by outbreaks of plague. When plague arrived, Jewish residents fled to the countryside to protect themselves and their families. These departures sometimes brought the textile industry to a halt, endangering the production of the woolen broadcloth needed for distribution to the Janissaries. Hence, flight from plague created tensions between the Ottoman central administration and the Jewish broadcloth weavers of Salonica. Documents of the 2nd half of the 16th century reveal negotiations that sought to address this problem. Close analysis of these documents offers unique insights into how the conflicting interests of the Ottoman administration and subject population were mediated.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10835-014-9219-9#page-1Primary URL Description: Springer link access
Access Model: paywall
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Jewish History
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters (Article)Title: New Science and Old Sources: Why the Ottoman Experience of Plague Matters
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: Reconstructing the Ottoman plague experience is vital to understanding the larger Afro-
Eurasian disease zone during the Second Pandemic. This essay deals with two different aspects of this experience. On the one hand, it discusses the historical and historiographical problems that rendered this epidemiological experience mostly invisible to previous scholars of plague. On the other, it reconstructs the empire’s plague ecologies, with particular attention to plague’s persistence, focalization, and transmission. Further, it uses this epidemiological experience to offer new insights and complicate some commonly held assumptions about plague history and its relationship to plague science.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/Primary URL Description: journal publication
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Medieval Globe
Publisher: Arc Medieval Press
The Central Lydia Archaeological Survey: 2012 Work at Kaymakçi and in the Marmara Lake Basin (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Central Lydia Archaeological Survey: 2012 Work at Kaymakçi and in the Marmara Lake Basin
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Author: Christina Luke
Author: Peter Cobb
Author: Bradley Sekedat
Author: Caitlin O'Grady
Abstract: Summary of study and microtopographic survey of Kaymakci Hoyuk site in Central Lydia, Turkey, for the 2012 season, in preparation for excavation.
Date: 05/15/2012
Primary URL:
http://www.kulturvarliklari.gov.tr/TR,44761/arastirma-sonuclari-toplantilari.htmlPrimary URL Description: annual conference abstracts
Conference Name: 31. Arastirma Sonuçlari Toplantisi 2013
Statistics, Reform, and Regimes of Expertise in Turkey (Article)Title: Statistics, Reform, and Regimes of Expertise in Turkey
Author: Brian Silverstein
Abstract: Statistics is one of the chapters in Turkey's EU entry negotiations, and the country is transforming what statistics it collects, using what methodologies, at what intervals, how it publishes them, and how it uses them. It is in light of the new statistical knowledge that the country is reforming its institutions and practices. This paper argues that the relationship between statistics and social forms is not solely one of description. To the extent that statistics do not merely study or represent the objects they are purported to be about, but are intimately involved in intervening in/on those objects (e.g. social, economic, or ecological processes) and in fact in remaking them through reform and/or development, they have a performative nature. In this sense, statistics are less a methodology and more a technology—a technology of governance. The paper draws on the fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, technicians, and agricultural experts working on the design and implementation of EU-inspired reforms to develop new apparatuses for the collection of data on agriculture in the country.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14683849.2014.983690#previewPrimary URL Description: article first page preview
Access Model: paywall
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Turkish Studies
Publisher: Taylor and Francis online
Turkey in Theory (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Turkey in Theory
Author: Brian Silverstein
Abstract: The conference, "Turkey in Theory," offered a interdisciplinary examination of aspects of the environment, history, politics, contemporary culture, religion and society. It aimed to explore and advance collaborations of mutual influence among humanities, interpretive social science disciplines, and literary and artistic worlds. Scholars and graduate student participants identified and elaborated on emergent themes in scholarship related to Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, with a set of conversations and debates about what is on and over the horizon in Turkey- and Ottoman-related work.
Date Range: April 2-3, 2015
Location: Arizona Center for Turkish Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson
Primary URL:
http://www.confluencecenter.arizona.edu/faculty-grantsPrimary URL Description: University of Arizona Confluencecenter grant announcement with link to program schedule.
Defining the Polity by its Boundaries: The Anti-Kizilbash Campaigns as a Catalyst of Ottoman Confessionalization, 16th and 17th Centuries (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Defining the Polity by its Boundaries: The Anti-Kizilbash Campaigns as a Catalyst of Ottoman Confessionalization, 16th and 17th Centuries
Author: Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Abstract: The former Ottoman world is home to many communities of Muslim religious minorities that have been variously deemed heterodox deviants from the acknowledged schools of Islamic law. Narratives about them have focused on a certain impurity or syncretism in their religious practices. One such group is the Kizilbash/Alevi community of Anatolia. From the perspective of Ottoman rulers and statesmen, Kizilbash groups were often seen as politically dangerous heretics to be stamped out, or at the very least reformed. With the rise of ethnic Turkish nationalism, another offshoot of this narrative emerged, which posited Alevis as stewards of the pre-Islamic spirituality of Turks from Central Asia. These disparate narratives shared a focus, not on who the Alevis were, but rather why they were not proper Muslims.
Date: 10/24/2014
Primary URL:
http://www.indiana.edu/~iaunrc/newsevents/upcoming_events/beyond-sunni-shiite-conflict-ottomans-and-safavids-early-modern-eraPrimary URL Description: Conference webpage
Conference Name: Beyond the Sunni-Shiite Conflict: The Ottomans and the Safavids in the Early Modern Era
Culture and Power in Contemporary Turkey: Anthropological Perspectives (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Culture and Power in Contemporary Turkey: Anthropological Perspectives
Author: Brian Silverstein
Abstract: A considerable amount of interdisciplinary research has begun to flourish that is focused on Turkey but which also speaks to a wider audience and asks broader questions. Dr. Brian Silverstein used his research to consider the political and cultural ramifications of the use of statistics in the agricultural sector in Turkey.
Date: 5/7/2014
Primary URL:
http://guevents.georgetown.edu/event/turkish_studies_from_an_interdisciplinary_perspective_5201#.VUKYjpMuw08Conference Name: Turkish Studies from an Interdisciplinary Perspective
Rethinking ‘the Path’ to the Armenian Genocide (June 1913-August 1914) (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Rethinking ‘the Path’ to the Armenian Genocide (June 1913-August 1914)
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Abstract: Dr. Yektan Turkyilmaz presented his work on the conflict in Eastern Anatolia in the early twentieth century and the memory politics around it. He shows how discourses of victimhood have been engines of grievance that power the politics of fear, hatred and competing, exclusionary claims to statehood and territory by Turks, Armenians, and Kurds. Grounded in extensive archival research in American, British, Turkish, and Armenian historical repositories, Türkyilmaz traces how discourses of communal victimhood were generated around the traumatic ordeals in the two decades that preceded the Armenian genocide of 1915-6, carried out by the Unionist government. Türkyilmaz’s work pays special attention to the nature of political tension and debate among Armenians on the eve of the genocide.
Date: 4/18/2015
Primary URL:
http://cmes.berkeley.edu/the-origins-of-the-armenian-genocide-the-crucial-years-1912-15/Conference Name: The Origins of the Armenian Genocide: The Crucial Years, 1912-1915
Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600 (Book)Title: Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nu¨khet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/plague-and-empire-in-the-early-modern-mediterranean-world-the-ottoman-experience-1347-1600/oclc/904801161&referer=brief_resultsPublisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781107013384
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Prizes
Albert Hourani Book Award 2016
Date: 11/17/2016
Organization: Middle East Studies Association
Abstract: The Albert Hourani Book Award was established in 1991 to recognize outstanding publishing in Middle East studies. The award was named for Albert Hourani to recognize his long and distinguished career as teacher and mentor. Announced at the Awards Ceremony at MESA’s annual meeting, the Albert Hourani Book Award recognizes the very best in Middle East studies scholarship. It is competitive with a field this year of 110 monographs.
Fuat Köprülü Book Prize
Date: 11/23/2016
Organization: Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association
Abstract: An annual prize awarded to the most outstanding book in the field of Ottoman and Turkish studies published in the previous year, sponsored by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association with the generous support of the M. Münir Ertegün Foundation. Nominations may be made by the author, colleagues, publisher, or friends. Translated books, edited volumes, fiction, and textbooks are not eligible. English and Turkish are the preferred languages of submission.
Unbelief and Apostasy: Juridical Reconstruction of the Kizilbas Movement in the 16th Century (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Unbelief and Apostasy: Juridical Reconstruction of the Kizilbas Movement in the 16th Century
Author: Abdurrahman Atcil
Abstract: From the late eleventh century, Turcoman tribes occupied a substantial portion of the countryside in
central, southern and eastern Anatolia. They wanted to preserve their traditional tribal autonomy and loathed any strict central administration. Although they were Muslims, most rejected Sunni understanding of Islam and maintained some of their pre-Islamic religion and practices. Throughout the 16 th
century, the Safavid movement gained the support of many of these Turcoman tribes and grew thanks to their economic and military contribution. Because of this affiliation with the Safavid movement, these Turcoman tribes were called kizilbas (lit. red head) after the headgear designed by the leader of the Safavid order Haydar (d. 1488).
In addition to military fight, the Ottoman government sustained an ideological campaign against the kizilbas during the 16th century. In this context, the fatwas and treatises, which were composed by Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats and concerned the evaluation of the beliefs and practices of the kizilbas from the Sunni religio-legal perspective, played a significant role in the demarcation of ideological lines between two sides. Scholar-bureaucrats came up with two verdicts about the kizilbas: unbelief (kufr/küfür) and apostasy (irtidad). In their opinion, the first, unbelief, mainly concerned religious beliefs and
practices, while the second, apostasy, was related to political attitudes.
Date: 10/15/2015
Primary URL:
http://www.osmanliarastirmalari.org/Primary URL Description: Conference description with links to program and abstracts
Conference Name: International Congress on Ottoman Studies, Sakarya University
Can Current Research Materials Be Invoked in an Undergraduate Classroom Setting? The Case for Greater Student Involvement (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Can Current Research Materials Be Invoked in an Undergraduate Classroom Setting? The Case for Greater Student Involvement
Author: John Curry
Abstract: The question of whether instructors in Islamic history should bring their current research into the undergraduate classroom can raise ambivalent feelings. Success is not guaranteed: students could find the reading and discussion of cutting-edge research arcane, especially in the pre-modern period; the materials might not have a good fit with the existing pedagogy of courses we have constructed (or inherited from others); or we may not be fully secure about our translation or presentation of novel sources. This roundtable presentation presents three case studies of ongoing research that I have recently integrated into my undergraduate survey courses on the history of Islamic civilization, their benefits, and the reasons why I think such concerns may prove overblown.
Date: 11/22/2015
Primary URL:
https://mesana.org/mymesa/meeting_program_desc.php?pid=2ae86cff91efc7376fc4cd7fd015dc67Primary URL Description: Conference paper abstract.
Secondary URL:
https://mesana.org/mymesa/meeting_program_session.php?sid=15fc28f1e0b6a723dbb625228d4c007bSecondary URL Description: Conference session abstract.
Conference Name: Methods and Strategies for Teaching the History of Islam, Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting 2015
‘It is Not Halal to Raid Them’: Piracy and Law in the 17th-Century Ottoman Mediterranean (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: ‘It is Not Halal to Raid Them’: Piracy and Law in the 17th-Century Ottoman Mediterranean
Author: Joshua M. White
Abstract: This paper explores the efforts of the Ottoman central government in Istanbul to regulate the corsairing activities of the perennially disobedient port cities of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli and to define what constituted a legally permissible (halal) raid. From the late 15th century onward, the diplomatic instruments that regulated peaceful relations between the Ottomans and the Venetians, the ahdnames, contained clauses prohibiting piracy and the enslavement of each other’s subjects. Similar articles made their way into the ahdnames subsequently concluded with France, England, and the Netherlands. By the 17th century, however, the sultan’s nominal subjects in North Africa were regularly violating these provisions, with Tunisian and Algerian corsairs routinely attacking Venetian ships and raiding Venetian shores in contravention of the treaty and over the objections of Ottoman officials in Istanbul.
Even as the Atlantic powers concluded treaties directly with the North African port cities beginning in the 1620s, meant to spare them from attack and redirect it towards their rivals, Venice continued to seek redress exclusively from Istanbul.
Drawing on an array of Ottoman and Venetian archival and manuscript sources, this paper surveys the damage done to Venetian interests in the Ottoman Mediterranean by piratical attacks in the first half of the 17th century, and it explores the ways in which Ottoman jurists and administrators attempted – through fatwas and decrees rather than by force – to counter the claims of Tunisian and Algerian corsairs that the principles of retaliation, custom and Islamic law gave them the right to attack Venetian targets, irrespective of what the sultan’s ahdname promised.
Date: 10/16/2014
Primary URL:
http://www.sylviaioannoufoundation.org/conferences/2nd-international-conference/papers/27-conferences/2nd-international-conference/papers/140-%E2%80%98it-is-not-halal-to-raid-them%E2%80%99-piracy-and-law-in-the-17th-century-ottoman-mediterranean.htmlPrimary URL Description: Conference paper abstract.
Secondary URL:
http://www.sylviaioannoufoundation.org/conferences/2nd-international-conference/organisation.htmlSecondary URL Description: Conference presentation, Corsairs and Pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean, 15th-19th Centuries
Conference Name: Sylvia Ioannou Foundation, Second International Conference
The Greek East: Temples and Engineering (Book Section)Title: The Greek East: Temples and Engineering
Author: John Senseney
Editor: Margaret Miles
Abstract: This chapter highlights the development and major achievements of temple construction and engineering in the Greek East, placing them against a larger intercultural background as a foundation for further exploration of the characteristically Greek interests in theory, scale, and design. In order to more fully explore the innovations and intercultural context underlying the reshaping of the environment in Archaic Ionia, the chapter focuses on the all-marble, truly Ionic Artemision at Ephesos and the Tunnel of Eupalinos at Samos. The most complete evidence for such engineering pertains to the truly gigantic Kroisos Temple at Ephesos. As in Archaic Ionian temple architecture, the tunnel of Eupalinos is perhaps best understood against the larger context of fluid intercultural knowledge and traditions made possible by the tensions and shared achievements of the recently dissolved Neo-Assyrian world, but created at a larger scale with great skill and innovation
Year: 2016
Primary URL: DOI: 10.1002/9781118327586
Primary URL Description: Wiley-Blackwell access
Access Model: print book
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Greek Architecture
ISBN: 978-1-4443-359
Scale, Architects, and Architectural Theory (Book Section)Title: Scale, Architects, and Architectural Theory
Author: John Senseney
Editor: Margaret Miles
Abstract: Along with Ionian abstract thinkers like Anaximander in the sixth century BCE, Archaic architects were the earliest Greek prose writers. Whereas Anaximander and others wrote about the nature of the universe, architects like Theodoros, Chersiphron, and Metagenes wrote about their discoveries and successes in the sphere of building construction. In the theory of Hellenistic architects focused on questions of design, there developed an interest in scale, which enabled the design of buildings through graphic means for the envisioning of buildings from the abstract, disembodied aerial view of ground plans. With extensive reference to the Didymaion, this chapter explores scale planning in Hellenistic architectural theory as reflected in Vitruvius. The theoretical processes and principles scale design developed first in traditional methods of construction that preceded common application of reduced scale in the art of building, which was unlikely to have taken place prior to Hermogenes in the later third century BCE.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: DOI: 10.1002/9781118327586
Primary URL Description: book content access
Access Model: on-line and print book
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Greek Architecture
ISBN: 978-1-4443-359
Writing the History of the Armenian Genocide (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Writing the History of the Armenian Genocide
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Abstract: Dr. Turkyilmaz engaged in a conversation on the genealogies of fundamental problems in various forms of writing the history of the Armenian Genocide, namely teleology, archival fetishism and obsession with meta-narratives. Locating these historiographical issues within broader debates on violence, trauma and memory-building, the discussion proposes ways of rethinking historical research design and narrative formation for nuanced, that is conceptually poignant and methodologically accommodating, analyses.
Date: 04/29/2015
Primary URL:
http://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/berliner-seminar/sommersemester-2015/yektan-tuerkyilmaz-shoghig-hartmann.htmlPrimary URL Description: Conference description.
Secondary URL:
https://voicerepublic.com/talks/writing-the-history-of-armenian-genocideSecondary URL Description: Conference paper, audio presentation.
Conference Name: Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe, Forum Transregionale Studien
Collective Anxiety and Competition for Justice: The Mysterious Murder Case of Melkon Mir-Sakoyan in Van, September 1913 (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Collective Anxiety and Competition for Justice: The Mysterious Murder Case of Melkon Mir-Sakoyan in Van, September 1913
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Abstract: Using a case study of a murder that took place in Van, eastern Anatolia, Türkyilmaz’s discusses the nature of political tension and debate among Armenians on the eve of the genocide. His analysis here goes beyond deterministic, escalationist and teleological perspectives on the antecedents of the Armenian genocide; instead, it highlights political agency and enabling structures of the war, offering a new perspective on the tragic violence of Eastern Anatolia in the early twentieth century.
Date: 06/09/2015
Primary URL:
http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/events/workshops/workshops-since-2006/security-crime-punishment-and-prisons-in-the-late-ottoman-empire.html?type=98&tx_wtgallery_pi1[show]=253319216&cHash=ef341fc43af369dfe276604471613c57Primary URL Description: Conference and paper abstract
Conference Name: Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire, Zentrum Moderner Orient
Van 1915: Reconstructing the Genocide, Resistance, and Death of an Ottoman City (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Van 1915: Reconstructing the Genocide, Resistance, and Death of an Ottoman City
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Abstract: Yektan Türkyilmaz revisits the most controversial site of the Armenian genocide, the province of Van between April and August 1915, and explores the political agendas and militaristic/strategic decisions that led to the total destruction of this historic Ottoman city. Van was the epicenter of the Armenian genocide, the place where it incubated. Paradoxically, however, genocide as such did not occur in the city/province; as the entire power structure in Van swiftly and radically changed hands between rival empires multiple times in a matter of a few months. Van in 1915 was a distinctive space within the larger devastating landscape of the Armenian genocide, one where myriad experiences, agendas, and actors clashed without any single dynamic or force establishing its unquestioned hegemony. Yet the city Van was the site and victim of an urbicide par excellence. All parties involved in the process targeted the city Van—its infrastructure, residential areas, government buildings, market place, military buildings, communication facilities, and foreign missions. Drawing on Armenian, Ottoman and Russian archival documents, periodicals, memoirs, photographic and cartographic materials and secondary sources his research investigates the ideological/symbolic and militaristic/strategic decisions that led to urbicide in Van and the continuing memory politics around it.
Date: 01/07/2014
Primary URL:
http://www.eume-berlin.de/en/events/the-berliner-seminar/winter-term-201415/07-jan-yektan-tuerkyilmaz.htmlPrimary URL Description: Conference and paper abstract.
Conference Name: Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe, Forum Transregionale Studien
Piracy and the Evolution of Ottoman-Venetian Maritime Law, 1482–1670 (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Piracy and the Evolution of Ottoman-Venetian Maritime Law, 1482–1670
Author: Joshua M. White
Abstract: Piracy proved to be one of the defining issues in Ottoman-Venetian relations. More than any other concern, rampant piracy threatened commerce and the peace and sent innumerable diplomats, messengers, dispatches, and funds back and forth across the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin. Anti-piracy articles appeared in every commercial treaty (known as ahdname) the two powers concluded from 1482 onward. Based on analysis of the original treaty documents, Ottoman decrees, letters and Venetian ambassadorial dispatches, this paper focuses on the gradual evolution of the diplomatic and legal framework through which Ottoman and Venetian authorities dealt with incidents of unauthorized piracy involving their subjects over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Combining maritime custom, negotiation, and the legal traditions of both sides, Istanbul and Venice constructed a platform of codes of conduct at sea, expectations for how to deal with pirates, and a formal system for providing restitution for damages and the return of their illegally enslaved subjects. In so doing, Ottomans and Venetians created a new body of maritime law that laid the groundwork for principles that would become enshrined in modern international law.
Date: 01/04/2015
Primary URL:
https://aha.confex.com/aha/2015/webprogram/Paper16893.htmlPrimary URL Description: Conference paper abstract.
Secondary URL:
https://aha.confex.com/aha/2015/webprogram/Session12127.htmlSecondary URL Description: Conference session abstract, Contentions of Sovereignty and Empire: The Ottoman Empire and International Law, 1400s to 1900s.
Conference Name: American Historical Society Meeting
Memory and Meaning in Bin Tepe, the Lydian Cemetery of a “Thousand Mounds (Book Section)Title: Memory and Meaning in Bin Tepe, the Lydian Cemetery of a “Thousand Mounds
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Author: Christina Luke
Editor: Ute Kelp
Editor: Olivier Henry
Abstract: The paper aims to reassess the meaning of Iron Age tumuli in central Lydia, western Turkey, and especially in the area of Bin Tepe, thought to be the Lydian royal cemetery. Invoking scholarship on shared and collective memories and citing both the discovery of a Bronze Age kingdom in the basin of the Gygaean Lake (modern Marmara Golu) and the sacred significance of the area deriving from the cyclic fluctuation of its water bodies, we suggest Lydian kings selected Bin Tepe for burial to associate themselves with and co-opt local memories of heroes and sacred meanings. Bin Tepe is thus considered from the perspective of the significance of its natural and conceptual landscapes. The meanings and memories of Bin Tepe in post-Lydian through recent times are assessed briefly, stressing its dynamic valuing as it was exploited for treasures and strategic qualities in war, plunder, and agriculture.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110267501/9783110267501-026/9783110267501-026.xml?format=EBOKPrimary URL Description: Book chapter abstract and preview.
Secondary URL:
http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/177431Secondary URL Description: Book presentation
Access Model: print and electronic book
Publisher: DeGruyter
Book Title: Tumulus as Sema: Proceedings of an International Conference on Space, Politics, Culture, and Religion
ISBN: 978-3-11-02599
Composing Communities: Chalcolithic through Iron Age Survey Ceramics in the Marmara Lake Basin, Western Turkey (Article)Title: Composing Communities: Chalcolithic through Iron Age Survey Ceramics in the Marmara Lake Basin, Western Turkey
Author: Peter Cobb
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Author: Christina Luke
Author: Ciler Cilingiroglu
Abstract: Diachronic survey in the Marmara Lake basin of western Turkey confirms long-term settlement activity from the 5th millennium b.c. to the present. Here we present the results from a study of ceramics and settlement distribution pertaining to the Chalcolithic through the Iron Age periods (ca. 5th/4th–1st millennium b.c.). Our dataset confirms the value of a multi-pronged approach when establishing ceramic typologies from survey datasets, incorporating distribution in the landscape with macroscopic, microscopic (petrographic), and chemical (Instrumental Neutron Activation) analyses. Our results offer valuable insights into continuity as well as change of ceramic recipes in western Anatolia during the rise of urbanism in the Middle to Late Bronze Age followed by the establishment of an imperial realm in the Iron Age. From a methodological perspective, our results illustrate the value of macroscopic and chemical approaches, including principal component, distribution, density, and discriminant analyses that can be refined further by petrography, for the interpretation of surface survey ceramics.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/2042458215Y.0000000009Primary URL Description: Paper abstract and electronic access.
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Field Archaeology
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
The Halveti Sufi Order in the Early Ottoman Empire (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: The Halveti Sufi Order in the Early Ottoman Empire
Abstract: Discussion of the history of Sufism and the Halveti order, its place during the Ottoman period, exploring the intellectual, political, and social dimensions of Sufi movement.
Author: John Curry
Date: 12/10/2012
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Scholars, Sufis, and Disease (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Scholars, Sufis, and Disease
Abstract: The lecture explores the possibility that Muslim religious works offer novel insights on plagues and epidemics among the medieval and early modern Ottomans.
Author: John Curry
Date: 06/22/2015
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
The Central Lydia Archaeological Survey and Second-Millennium BCE Western Anatolia (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: The Central Lydia Archaeological Survey and Second-Millennium BCE Western Anatolia
Abstract: This lecture describes the progress of the Lydian survey project and explores the new discovery of a major Bronze Age mound in the Lydian plain. The lecture is part of the annual ARIT series on archaeology, cosponsored with the Turkish American Association
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Date: 04/01/2011
Location: Turkish American Association, Ankara
Architectural Authenticity in Classical Anatolian Monuments: Time, Change, and the Roman Birth of Architecture (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Architectural Authenticity in Classical Anatolian Monuments: Time, Change, and the Roman Birth of Architecture
Abstract: This lecture explored John Senseney's research on the effects of East Greek design and technology on the development of Classical architecture, with a particular reference to the Temple of Augustus and Rome in Ankara.
Author: John Senseney
Date: 4/24/2012
Location: ARIT Ankara Center
Rethinking Armenian Genocide (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Rethinking Armenian Genocide
Abstract: Using archival materials collected in the course of his research, Yektan Turkyilmaz discussed the stories and biographies of Armenians displaced or lost in the genocide.
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Date: 04/29/2013
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Networks of Plague and Imperial Expansion: the Case of Early Modern Ottoman Cities (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Networks of Plague and Imperial Expansion: the Case of Early Modern Ottoman Cities
Abstract: Discussion of the archival evidence for the Ottoman response to the plague and its repercussions in the administration of the Empire.
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Date: 05/02/2011
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Piracy and Law in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Piracy and Law in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean
Abstract: This lecture explores the effects of piracy on the formation of international and maritime law in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Author: Joshua White
Date: 07/29/2013
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Mobility of Scholars and Formation of a Self-Sustaining Scholarly System in the Lands of Rum (Book Section)Title: Mobility of Scholars and Formation of a Self-Sustaining Scholarly System in the Lands of Rum
Author: Abdurrahman Atcil
Editor: Sara Nur Yildiz
Editor: A. S. Peacock
Abstract: Beginning in the eleventh century, Muslim Turks gradually established political control over the Byzantine territories in Anatolia and the Balkans, areas typically referred to as the lands of Rum. A local Muslim scholarly tradition, however, did not immediately emerge in these lands following the establishment of Muslim political control. Atcil seeks to uncover the origins of a self-perpetuating scholarly system in the lands of Rum during the fifteenth century, examining the conditions, which might have influenced scholars’ decision to move around, in the lands of Rum and other Muslim lands during the fifteenth century. He suggests that the tempo at which scholars moved to the lands of Rum probably remained consistent and perhaps even increased from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, whereas during the fifteenth century the scholarly scene began to change and move in the direction of being self-sufficient. He points to the region’s relative political stability, the concurrent presence of a critical number of high-level scholars, and the establishment of a growing number of well-funded madrasas of royal prestige as factors that made it possible for scholars to receive an advanced education within the lands of Rum.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://www.ergon-verlag.de/en/orientalistik/istanbuler-texte-und-studien/band-34.phpPrimary URL Description: Publisher's web presentation
Access Model: hardback book
Publisher: Ergon-Verlag GmbH
Book Title: Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Anatolia
ISBN: 978-3-95650-15
Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Book)Title: Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
Author: Abdurrahman Atcil
Abstract: During the early Ottoman period (1300–1453), scholars in the empire carefully kept their distance from the ruling class. This changed with the capture of Constantinople. From 1453 onwards, the Ottoman government co-opted large groups of scholars, usually over a thousand at a time, and employed them in a hierarchical bureaucracy to fulfill educational, legal and administrative tasks. Abdurrahman Atçil explores the factors that brought about this gradual transformation of scholars into scholar-bureaucrats, including the deliberate legal, bureaucratic and architectural actions of the Ottoman sultans and their representatives, scholars' own participation in shaping the rules governing their status and careers, and domestic and international events beyond the control of either group.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/scholars-and-sultans-in-the-early-modern-ottoman-empire/47E5026CF35CC053545BBFCFAE604C3APrimary URL Description: Publisher's presentation
Access Model: hardback book
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781316819326
Ottoman History Podcast Episode 252: Tracing Plague in the Ottoman Empire (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast Episode 252: Tracing Plague in the Ottoman Empire
Writer: Nukhet Varlik
Director: Nir Shafir
Producer: Ottoman History Podcast
Abstract: Geneticists and historians are generally considered strange bedfellows. However, new advances in bio-archaeology and genetics are facilitating this odd coupling. In this episode, we speak to Nükhet Varlik, author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: the Ottoman experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge University Press), about how genetic evidence has transformed the study of the plague in the past ten years, allowing geneticists to more readily identify the presence of Yersinia pestis bacteria in human remains. Whereas before historians had been hesitant to diagnose diseases posthumously, they can now speak with greater certainty about the presence of plague. We then discuss the life of plague in the early modern Ottoman Empire in particular, focusing on the creation of ‘plague capitals’ in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire following the conquest of Constantinople and how integrating the Ottoman experience of plague changes the story of how historians of medicine approach the topic. To inspire future collaborations among our listeners, we end with a peek at the process of working with geneticists and what such approaches can contribute to the study of the history of the Middle East.
Date: 07/29/2016
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/07/plague.htmlPrimary URL Description: podcast link
Access Model: open access on-line
Format: Web
Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean: New Histories of Disease in Ottoman Society (Book)Title: Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean: New Histories of Disease in Ottoman Society
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Editor: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: This volume discusses diseases that affected human and non-human populations in areas stretching from the Red Sea and Egypt to Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, in the early modern and modern eras. It tackles various questions of historiography and sources, tests new interdisciplinary methodologies, and asks new questions while revisiting older ones. Lastly, it contributes to Ottoman studies, the history of medicine, Mediterranean and European history, as well as global studies on the role of epidemics in history.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/products/p-80108-97110-49-8023/Primary URL Description: Publisher's book presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: Arc Humanities Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781942401155
Copy sent to NEH?: No
‘Oriental Plague’ or Epidemiological Orientalism? Revisiting the Plague Episteme of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Book Section)Title: ‘Oriental Plague’ or Epidemiological Orientalism? Revisiting the Plague Episteme of the Early Modern Mediterranean
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Editor: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: In the early modern era, European imaginaries of the plague associated the disease’s geographic origin with areas ruled by the Ottoman Empire. This particular imagined plague-scape was nurtured by a constant supply of plague news that came from eastern Mediterranean port cities and the common tropes of the European travel literature about the indifference of the Muslims inhabiting that land, their fatalism, and their failure to understand contagion. Taken as a whole, the early modern European plague episteme was, to a large extent, shaped by observations of or accounts about the Ottoman experience of plague. Especially after the plague (and historical memories of it) had started to recede from western Europe in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with the Enlightenment, it was this set of knowledge, beliefs, and ideas that helped to formulate the origins, foci (foyers de peste), historicity, and directionality of the "Oriental plague."
This plague paradigm, imbued with unmistakable overtones of epidemiological Orientalism, has had lasting ramifications for the student of the post-Black Death Mediterranean, which is often imagined in epidemiological binaries. In fact, it is fascinating to see how much of that epidemiological imagination has found its way into modern scientific and historical thinking about the plague in time and space. With a conviction that we can no longer afford to keep a Eurocentric vision of this epidemiological past, Varlik revisits some aspects of the epidemiological imaginaries of the Orient. Following the recent work of environmental historians of the Middle East and North Africa, she highlights how the Ottoman plague-scape was described by early modern European travelers and how this knowledge was used for formulating a watershed in the European imagination.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/products/p-80108-97110-49-8023/Primary URL Description: Publisher's book presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: Arc Humanities Press
Book Title: Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean: New Histories of Disease in Ottoman Society
ISBN: 9781942401155
The Story of a Forgotten Kingdom? Survey Archaeology and the Historical Geography of Central Western Anatolia in the Second Millennium BC (Article)Title: The Story of a Forgotten Kingdom? Survey Archaeology and the Historical Geography of Central Western Anatolia in the Second Millennium BC
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: This article presents previously unknown archaeological evidence of a mid-second-millennium BC kingdom located in central western Anatolia. Discovered during the work of the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey in the Marmara Lake basin of the Gediz Valley in western Turkey, the material evidence appears to correlate well with text-based reconstructions of Late Bronze Age historical geography drawn from Hittite archives. One site in particular Kaymakçi stands out as a regional capital and the results of the systematic archaeological survey allow for an understanding of local settlement patterns, moving beyond traditional correlations between historical geography and capital sites alone. Comparison with contemporary sites in central western Anatolia, furthermore, identifies material commonalities in site forms that may indicate a regional architectural tradition if not just influence from Hittite hegemony.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology/article/story-of-a-forgotten-kingdom-survey-archaeology-and-the-historical-geography-of-central-western-anatolia-in-the-second-millennium-bc/84CC637871BE8EFE647CA8AEF6193F00Primary URL Description: current link to full-text article
Secondary URL: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2016.2
Secondary URL Description: permalink
Access Model: open access on-line
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: European Journal of Archaeology
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Why Should We Rethink the History and Memory of Van/Vasburagan? (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Why Should We Rethink the History and Memory of Van/Vasburagan?
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Abstract: Turkyilmaz reviews the history of Van as a center of Armenian identity in the late 19th century and epicenter for violence beginning in 1915. He clarifies the complex wartime history and notes how the events and aftermath in Van colors perceptions in the region and world today.
Date: 11/11/2016
Primary URL:
http://hrantdink.org/en/activities/projects/history-program/327-the-social-cultural-and-economic-history-of-van-and-the-regionConference Name: Hrant Dink Foundation conference on The Social, Cultural and Economic History of Van and the Region
Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Book)Title: Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean
Author: Joshua M. White
Abstract: The 1570s marked the beginning of an age of pervasive piracy in the Mediterranean that persisted into the eighteenth century. Nowhere was more inviting to pirates than the Ottoman-dominated eastern Mediterranean. In this bustling maritime ecosystem, weak imperial defenses and permissive politics made piracy possible, while robust trade made it profitable. By 1700, the limits of the Ottoman Mediterranean were defined not by Ottoman territorial sovereignty or naval supremacy, but by the reach of imperial law, which had been indelibly shaped by the challenge of piracy.
Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean is the first book to examine Mediterranean piracy from the Ottoman perspective, focusing on the administrators and diplomats, jurists and victims who had to contend most with maritime violence. Pirates churned up a sea of paper in their wake: letters, petitions, court documents, legal opinions, ambassadorial reports, travel accounts, captivity narratives, and vast numbers of decrees attest to their impact on lives and livelihoods. Joshua M. White plumbs the depths of these uncharted, frequently uncatalogued waters, revealing how piracy shaped both the Ottoman legal space and the contours of the Mediterranean world.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28577Primary URL Description: Publisher's book presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503602526
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Prizes
Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize
Date: 8/1/2020
Organization: The Mediterranean Seminar/CU Mediterranean Studies Group (CUMSG)
Abstract: Focusing on the period beginning with the battle of Lepanto and extending through the so-called “Northern Invasion” of the English and the Dutch into the Mediterranean, this book examines the central role piracy played in the emergence of an “Ottoman Mediterranean” as a legal space shaped by multiple, ever-shifting factors. In this wide-ranging and beautifully written study, archival sources spanning both religious and imperial spheres of law become windows onto the astonishing complexity of an early modern Mediterranean in which there were “no hard and fast lines separating Christian and Muslim spheres, but rather a culture of legal pluralism in which merchants, travelers, and seamen took advantage of multiple overlapping jurisdictions.”
Scholars, Sufis, and disease: Can Muslim religious works offer us novel insights on plagues and epidemics among the medieval and early modern Ottomans? (Book Section)Title: Scholars, Sufis, and disease: Can Muslim religious works offer us novel insights on plagues and epidemics among the medieval and early modern Ottomans?
Author: John Curry
Editor: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: Researchers face a number of obstacles when seeking to understand how the Musim populations of the medieval and early modern period of Ottoman times coped with plagues and other epidemic diseases. Among these difficulties is the fact that information is often scattered across a wide variety of sources, many of which do not treat the topic directly. Utilizing these sources, which have not been addressed in the historiography to date, can yield interesting resuts. My contribution to this volume aims to demonstrate the potential usefulness of specific types of early modern ottoman religious writings, which can illuminate how various segments of the ottoman population viewed plagues, diseases, and possible remedies for them in the pre-modern era.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/products/p-80108-97110-49-8023/Primary URL Description: Publisher's book presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: Arc Humanities Press
Book Title: Plague and Contagion in the Early Islamic Mediterranean: New Histories of Disease in Ottoman Society
ISBN: 9781942401155
Unraveling Heresy: Sufism, Politics, and the Formation of the Kizilbash/Alevi Communities in Ottoman Anatolia (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Unraveling Heresy: Sufism, Politics, and the Formation of the Kizilbash/Alevi Communities in Ottoman Anatolia
Author: Ayfer Karakaya Stump
Abstract: The Kizilbash, today referred to as Alevis, constitute the largest religious minority in modern Turkey, making up somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the country's population, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans and Iraq. The talk explores the formation and transformation of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities in the borderland territories between two imperial powers, the Ottomans and the Safavids, demonstrating the crucial role of informal networks of saintly lineages and Sufi convents in forging and sustaining their collective structures and identities.
Date: 04/13/2017
Primary URL:
http://liberalarts.utexas.edu/public-affairs/events/2567Primary URL Description: University of Texas, Islamic Studies Initiative event announcement
Conference Name: Islamic Studies Initiative
Technologies of Commensuration: Performativity and the Reform of Statistics in Turkey (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Technologies of Commensuration: Performativity and the Reform of Statistics in Turkey
Author: Brian Silverstein
Abstract: This talk examines the changing role of statistics in the apparatus through which objects and practices are being known and intervened upon (governed) in Turkey. It argues that statistics are a crucial piece of the assemblage of human and non-human things involved in the large-scale transformation of institutions in Turkey in line with EU norms and standards, and that this work of reforming of institutions, practices and ultimately livelihoods is often undertaken in the name of technical adjustments merely to collect better data. Hence through the study of changes in Turkey’s collection and use of statistics we are in a position to examine the processes through which collectivities in Turkey are made commensurable with those in the EU. By looking at the case of agriculture and agriculture statistics I show how it is through the reform of statistics along EU standards that a lot of the ‘work’ of engineering commensurability of social forms is accomplished. Finally, I suggest that what this means is that the work of reform is done through the reform of statistics at least as much as, if not more than, through more explicitly deliberative mechanisms, which points to the technopolitical nature of reform itself.
Date: 02/03/2017
Primary URL:
https://mesc.osu.edu/events/brian-silversteinPrimary URL Description: Ohio State University, Middle Eastern Studies Center event announcement
Conference Name: Ohio State University, Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Anthropology, and Centers for Middle Eastern Studies and Folklore
Cup-Marks and Citadels: Evidence for Libation in 2nd-Millennium B.C.E. Western Anatolia (Article)Title: Cup-Marks and Citadels: Evidence for Libation in 2nd-Millennium B.C.E. Western Anatolia
Author: Christina Luke
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Abstract: Shallow conical depressions hewn into bedrock, known as cup-marks, have been documented at and around 2nd-millennium b.c.e. citadels in the Marmara Lake basin of the Gediz Valley, western Anatolia. These rupestral features are among the best indications of the presence of libation ceremonies in the region and provide evidence that local communities shared in cultural traditions spread over western and central Anatolia. Libation rituals in the basin were probably intended to summon the divine for protection, stewardship of the dead, and/or assurance of agricultural prosperity through maintenance of stable environmental conditions. Periodic catastrophes, resulting from massive inundations and/or droughts typical to the region, weigh in favor of an environmental interpretation. We frame our discussion of the topography and archaeology of the Gediz Valley and the evidence for Middle to Late Bronze Age cup-marks within the context of historical geography and the archaeology of Anatolia.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: DOI: 10.5615/bullamerschoorie.378.0001
Primary URL Description: JSTOR access
Secondary URL:
http://asorblog.org/cup-marks-citadels-evidence-libation-2nd-millennium-b-c-e-western-anatolia/Secondary URL Description: ASOR access
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
Publisher: American Schools of Oriental Research
Armenians on Records: Music Production from Homeland to Diasporas (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Armenians on Records: Music Production from Homeland to Diasporas
Abstract: The lecture explores the multi-directional journeys of Armenians in recording history from the Ottoman Empire to the diasporas, particularly to the United States, in the first half of the 20th century, as musicians, as producers and as merchants. Drawing on life stories and examples of commercial records in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the diasporas, it illustrates the changing styles, content, and language use in music production vis-à-vis place, trauma and audience / cultural dialogue throughout one of the most turbulent periods of Armenian history. The talk will specifically underscore the cultural, political and identitarian implications of the emergence of recording technology on Armenian communities.
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Date: 03/16/2018
Location: Columbia University, New York
Primary URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xUTxoFc9K8Primary URL Description: video file of lecture
Secondary URL:
https://armenianweekly.com/2018/03/16/turkyilmaz-to-discuss-armenians-on-records-music-productiofrom-homeland-to-diasporas-at-columbia/Secondary URL Description: event announcement from Armenian Weekly
The Kaymakçi Archaeological Project: 2016 Excavations and Research at a Bronze Age Center (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Kaymakçi Archaeological Project: 2016 Excavations and Research at a Bronze Age Center
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Abstract: Report on the archaeological evidence of a mid-second-millennium BC kingdom located in central western Anatolia. Discovered during the work of the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey in the Marmara Lake basin of the Gediz Valley in western Turkey, the material evidence appears to correlate well with text-based reconstructions of Late Bronze Age historical geography drawn from Hittite archives. The site of Kaymakçi Hoyuk stands out as a regional capital. The results of the systematic archaeological excavation correlate with survey data to develop an understanding of the settlement and its region.
Date: 05/23/2017
Primary URL:
http://www.kulturvarliklari.gov.tr/Eklenti/51406,39sem20170505prenggncpdf.pdf?0Primary URL Description: conference program, p.7
Conference Name: Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 39th International Symposium of Excavations, Surveys, and Archaeometry
Greek Public and Religious Architecture (Book Section)Title: Greek Public and Religious Architecture
Author: John Senseney
Editor: Georgia L. Irby
Abstract: Ancient Greek temples and treasuries articulated order at a monumental scale. The same may be said for Greek civic buildings for commerce, governance, and spectacle. The architectural language of order in these public and religious buildings consisted of the Doric and Ionic “orders,” the systems of ornament whose origins and maturation took place in stone post-and-lintel construction. Through the polis’ patronage of architects, traditionally educated individuals from backgrounds outside construction, building projects visually unified the often politically disconnected city-states and the sanctuaries they shared by way of the orders as emphatically Panhellenic expressions. More than this, the experience of ordering architectural form provided the tools, techniques, metaphors, and cultural conditioning for seeing and envisioning order in the realms of philosophy and science.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: DOI:10.1002/9781118373057
Primary URL Description: Wiley Blackwell content access
Access Model: print, paywall
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome volume 2
ISBN: 9781118372678
The AKP, sectarianism, and the Alevis’ struggle for equal rights in Turkey (Article)Title: The AKP, sectarianism, and the Alevis’ struggle for equal rights in Turkey
Author: Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Abstract: The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been ruling Turkey since 2002, was founded by a splinter group from within the Islamist Virtue Party (FP). The most obvious difference between the old guard of the FP and the younger, reformist cadres who established the AKP was the latter’s deliberate and efficacious implementation of the discourse of democracy and human rights in articulating their political agenda. This discursive shift not only increased the AKP’s votes, but also gained them many supporters among liberal intellectuals in Turkey and abroad, who saw in them a potential to reconcile Islam with democracy. So much was invested in this hopeful vision that pro-AKP liberals for a long time turned a blind eye to many contrary developments in the country or tried to diminish their significance. One such major blind spot has been the Alevis, who after nearly 14 years of AKP rule continue to face formal and informal discrimination on a daily basis. Despite their alleged commitment to religious freedom, and notwithstanding an ephemeral ‘Alevi opening’ in 2007–2008, the disenfranchisement of the Alevis has only deepened under the AKP with its accelerated top-down Islamization of broader Turkish society and the corollary intensification of sectarian discourse both in domestic and foreign policy.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: DOI: 10.1080/14608944.2016.1244935
Primary URL Description: article access
Access Model: on-line
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: National Identities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Research Fellowship, Frei Universität Berlin, Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien 2017-2019 (Staff/Faculty/Fellow Position)Name: Research Fellowship, Frei Universität Berlin, Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien 2017-2019
Abstract: Yektan Turkyilmaz, Roots and Routes of a Catastrophe: The Context and Afterlife of the Armenian Genocide (1915-2015). Türkyilmaz’s current project traces the genealogies of historiographical threads on the Armenian Genocide. Such a research involves a critical reassessment of the representations of the Armenian Genocide in multiple languages and formats, namely, in scholarly and popular histories, in memoirs, in visual arts as well as in literature and music. This project is inspired by two major concluding observations in his previous research. The first one is about how the Armenian Genocide as a process, ironically, has served as a ‘creative’ and generative reference that helped foster novel ideological formations redefining boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Particularly crucial in this trajectory is that the Armenian Genocide sets an exemplary case for many other instances of collective violence in the broader region of the Middle East. Further, it marked the emergence of ongoing tensions in the region between authoritarian secularism and Islamist models for modernization, between predatory ethno-nationalist or exclusionary religious movements that advocate social/demographic purity, and advocates pluralist cultural traditions.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/friedrichschlegel/fsgs/Institute/Kooperationen/Travelling-Traditions/2017-EUME/index.htmlPrimary URL Description: Presentation of current research fellows including Yektan Turkyilmax
Ottoman History Podcast 333: Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast 333: Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean
Writer: Joshua White
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: Pirates are usually imagined as outlaws. But as the history of the early modern Mediterranean demonstrates, the line between illegal raiding and legitimate maritime violence was blurry, easily crossed, and often a moving target. In this episode, we talk to Joshua White about his book Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean. We consider how piracy shaped legal institutions and thought in the Ottoman world, and we get a glimpse of the fascinating and liminal world of pirates, jurists, and officials in the Ottoman Mediterranean.
Date: 9/16/2017
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/09/piracy.htmlPrimary URL Description: podcast access
Secondary URL:
https://soundcloud.com/ottoman-history-podcast/piracy-and-law-in-the-ottoman-mediterranean-joshua-whiteSecondary URL Description: podcast access
Access Model: open on-line access
Format: Web
A Pearl in Peril: Heritage and Diplomacy in Turkey (Book)Title: A Pearl in Peril: Heritage and Diplomacy in Turkey
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: A Pearl in Peril: Heritage and Diplomacy in Turkey explores the relationship between an urban core and her rural hinterland. Known as the Pearl of the Mediterranean, Izmir is Turkey’s third largest city with a vast and changing countryside.
Provides an interdisciplinary perspective on archaeology, diplomacy, policy and development studies
Probes the shiftng place of cultural heritage in the countryside of Izmir, from Classical ruins to industrial landscapes
Investigates the legacies of water diplomacy and the future of extraction studies for heritage studies
Places the heritage histories of Izmir and Lydia in a global context.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190498870.001.0001/oso-9780190498870Primary URL Description: Publisher page
Access Model: print and electronic book
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780190498870
Exploring Space, Economy, and Interregional Interaction at a Second-Millennium BCE Citadel in Central Western Anatolia: 2014–2017 Research at Kaymakçi (Article)Title: Exploring Space, Economy, and Interregional Interaction at a Second-Millennium BCE Citadel in Central Western Anatolia: 2014–2017 Research at Kaymakçi
Author: et.al.
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Author: Christina Luke
Author: S. Unlusoy
Author: C. Cakirlar
Abstract: Current understandings of the archaeology of second-millennium B.C.E. central western Anatolia are enriched by ongoing research at Kaymakçi, located in the Marmara Lake basin of the middle Gediz River valley in western Turkey. Discovered during regional survey in 2001, the site offers a critical node of exploration for understanding a previously unexamined period in a well-traversed geography thought to be the core of the Late Bronze Age Seha River Land known from Hittite texts. Here we present results from the first three seasons of excavation on the citadel of Kaymakçi plus a study season (2014–2017), introducing the site’s chronology, historical and regional context, and significance through presentation of excavation areas as well as material and subsistence economies. With reference to such evidence, we discuss the site’s development, organization, and interregional interactions, demonstrating its place in local and regional networks that connected Aegean and central Anatolian spheres of interest.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://www.ajaonline.org/field-report/3764Primary URL Description: article access page
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Journal of Archaeology
Publisher: Archaeological Institute of America
Commensuration, Performativity, and the Reform of Statistics in Turkey (Article)Title: Commensuration, Performativity, and the Reform of Statistics in Turkey
Author: Brian Silverstein
Abstract: Turkey's application to join the European Union, while currently a distant prospect, has nonetheless required the Turkish state to learn new things about the country in light of new norms and to use new formats and methodologies. The reform of its statistics is a key mechanism through which this transformation is taking place. A focus of intensive reforms is agricultural statistics, and these reforms have had an impact on farmers’ practices and livelihoods. The attempt to measure agriculture in new ways in Turkey is changing it through a logic of performativity. It is in and through this performativity that important work of institutional commensuration between Turkey and the EU is happening, illustrating the technopolitical nature of reform in many parts of the world.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: DOI: 10.1111/amet.12668
Access Model: pay wall
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Ethnologist
Publisher: American Anthropological Association
Piracy of the Ottoman Mediterranean: Slave Laundering and Subjecthood (Book Section)Title: Piracy of the Ottoman Mediterranean: Slave Laundering and Subjecthood
Author: Joshua White
Editor: Judith Tucker
Abstract: Contribution to the study of the pivotal historic place of the Mediterranean, drawn from the perspective from the south--that is from its Arab and African shores, and encompassing the role that rising violence on the sea had in defining law and diplomacy of the Ottoman Mediterranean.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520304604/the-making-of-the-modern-mediterraneanPrimary URL Description: publishers book page
Access Model: print book
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Title: The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South
ISBN: 9780520304604
Re-Evaluating the Decision-Making Processes in the Armenian Genocide (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Re-Evaluating the Decision-Making Processes in the Armenian Genocide
Abstract: The lecture focused on the decision-making processes at work in the Armenian Genocide. It included an actor-based framework that highlights institutional interests and political agency.
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Date: 4/17/2018
Location: Fresno State University
Primary URL:
http://www.fresnostatenews.com/2018/04/17/visiting-armenian-studies-professor-gives-final-lecture-april-17/Primary URL Description: Fresno State University news event
The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics, and Community (Book)Title: The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics, and Community
Author: Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Abstract: The Sufi religions order known as Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Yet several aspects of their history remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-kizilbash-alevis-in-ottoman-anatolia.htmlPrimary URL Description: Publisher's web presentation
Access Model: print and ebook
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781474432689
Prizes
SERMEISS Book Prize
Date: 8/7/2020
Organization: Southeastern Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society
Abstract: This award recognizes a peer-reviewed nonfiction work of outstanding scholarship published in English that exhibits original empirical and theoretical contributions in Middle Eastern or Islamic studies in any academic discipline in the social sciences or humanities from any time period.
The Safavid Threat and Juristic Authority in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th Century (Article)Title: The Safavid Threat and Juristic Authority in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th Century
Author: Abdurrahman Atcil
Abstract: This article investigates the opinions of three senior Ottoman jurists, Sarigörez (d. 1522), Kemalpasazade (d. 1534), and Ebussuud (d. 1574), on the subject of the Safavids and their supporters. Historians have treated these opinions as part of the vast polemical literature uniformly intended to justify an impending Ottoman attack against their Safavid rivals. Questioning the notion that all authors shared an undifferentiated attitude, this article underlines that, unlike most polemical literature, the opinions of these three jurists focused on the religiolegal aspects of the Safavid issue and varied and evolved in line with changing historical realities, the jurists’ divergent assessments of the Safavid threat, and their preference for different jurisprudential doctrines. Based on an analysis of the opinions, I argue that these jurists assumed a high degree of autonomy as producers and interpreters of the law and thus did not necessarily feel obliged to legitimate or excuse every imperial action.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S002074381700006XAccess Model: paywall
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: International Journal of Middle East Studies
Publisher: Middle East Studies Association
The Mediterranean in the Age of Global Piracy (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: The Mediterranean in the Age of Global Piracy
Writer: Daniel Hershenzon
Writer: Joshua White
Writer: Emrah Safa Gürkan
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: Piracy is often depicted as a facet of the wild, lawless expanses of the high seas. But in this episode, we explore the order that governed piracy, captivity, and ransom in the early modern Mediterranean and in turn, how these practices shaped early modern politics, Mediterranean connections, and the emergent notions of international law. Emrah Safa Gürkan talks about Ottoman corsairs and the practicalities of piracy in the early modern Mediterranean. Joshua White discusses facets of Islamic law and gender in the realm of piracy. And Daniel Hershenzon explores the paradoxical connections forged by slavery, captivity, and ransom on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Date: 01/28/2020
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/01/pirates.htmlPrimary URL Description: access to podcast
Access Model: open access
Format: Web
Plague in the Ottoman World (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Plague in the Ottoman World
Writer: Orhan Pamuk
Writer: Nukhet Varlik
Writer: Yaron Ayalon
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis, which lives in fleas that in turn live on rodents. Coronavirus is not the plague. Nonetheless, we can find many parallels between the current pandemic and the experience of plague for people who lived centuries ago. This special episode of Ottoman History Podcast brings together lessons from our past episodes on plague and disease in the early modern Mediterranean. Our guests offer state of the art perspectives on the history of plague in the Ottoman Empire, and many of their observations may also be useful for thinking about epidemics in the present day.
For instructors and students, we encourage you to listen with our comprehension and discussion questions in this GoogleDoc.
Date: 03/19/2020
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/03/plague-ottoman-empire.htmlPrimary URL Description: access to podcast and information
Access Model: open access
Format: Web
Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of COVID 19 (Article)Title: Rethinking the History of Plague in the Time of COVID 19
Author: Nukhet Varlik
Abstract: We are currently experiencing one of the most disruptive pandemics in modern history. The outbreak of COVID‐19 that was first recorded in Wuhan, China and quickly spread across the globe has resulted in nearly 5 million confirmed cases to date and more than 300,000 deaths. Where we stand now, it is still uncertain how many it will infect or kill worldwide, how long it will continue, and when—if ever—life will return to normal. What we know for sure is that this is a pivotal moment and that we are experiencing a historic event that will transform our societies both profoundly and irreversibly. As we wade into this new age of pandemics, it is critical to rethink how we write the history of pandemics. With a conviction that the past helps us to understand the present and that the present should help us to rethink the past, I turn to the legacy of past plagues. In this essay, I take stock of the lasting legacies of past plagues because they continue to shape the way we think about new pandemics. In particular, I address persistent problems, such as European exceptionalism, triumphalism, and epidemiological Orientalism, that are not only ubiquitous in plague studies, but also staples of public opinion about pandemics, past and present.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12302Primary URL Description: web and .pdf download
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Centaurus, An International Journal of the History of Science and its Cultural Aspects
Publisher: Wiley
Some Reflections on the Fluidity of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in an Ottoman Sunni Context (Book Section)Title: Some Reflections on the Fluidity of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in an Ottoman Sunni Context
Author: John Curry
Editor: Vefa Erginbas
Abstract: Throughout their histories, there has been a strong tendency within religious traditions to differentiate between true and false doctrine and praxis, and Muslim communities were no exception. As a result, Muslim authors from the earliest periods of their recorded history have regularly produced arguments aimed at either defining themselves as falling within the orbit of the Muslim community and therefore ‘acceptable’, or defining others as ‘heterodox’ or ‘heretical’, thereby excluding them as outsiders to the community liable to persecution. These attempts at defining or policing the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate thought and praxis were dramatically heightened by the modern intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, which placed definition and taxonomy at the heart of an attempt to create a universally applicable understanding of the world and its peoples.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvrs91c1Primary URL Description: Volume and chapter access
Access Model: JSTOR
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Book Title: Ottoman Sunnism: New Perspectives
ISBN: 978147444333
The Context and Afterlife of the Armenian Genocide (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: The Context and Afterlife of the Armenian Genocide
Writer: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Director: Alice von Bieberstein
Producer: EUME, Europa im Nahen Osten – Der Nahe Osten in Europa
Abstract: The EUME project of Türkyilmaz traces the contacts and confluences of Armenian Genocide scholarship and historiography with the broader body of literature on collective violence, and especially with the Holocaust Studies. Despite the common tendency to employ a blueprint of the Holocaust as an archetype, ironically, the dialogue between the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide studies has been scant. In contrast, the framework here pays particular attention to the ways in which critical genocide studies and especially contemporary Holocaust studies, that increasingly highlight the intricacies and paradoxes of decision making processes, can offer us new avenues for analysis.
Date: 12/13/2017
Primary URL:
https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/kalender/details/the-context-and-afterlife-of-the-armenian-genocide-1.htmlPrimary URL Description: On-line audio presentation
Access Model: open access
Format: Digital File
Plans, Surveying, and Measurement Systems: The Technology of Pre-Building in Roman Architecture (Book Section)Title: Plans, Surveying, and Measurement Systems: The Technology of Pre-Building in Roman Architecture
Author: John Senseney
Editor: Roger Ulrich
Editor: Caroline Quenemoen
Abstract: Planning with some prescribed graphic methods manifests the architect's vision in accordance with the authority of nature. Once realized on the plane of the drawing surface with the architect's tools and techniques of graphic construction, the surveyor's instruments and procedures project this vision into the final measurements of the monumental building on the plane of the earth. This chapter provides an overview of the Roman architectural process that largely determined form and experience before construction even began. A review of the details of these drawings is necessary to understand the general principles of scale planning, measurement, and commensuration in Greek and Roman architecture.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325117.ch8Primary URL Description: Wiley on-line library volume access
Access Model: open access
Publisher: Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Roman Architecture
ISBN: 9781405199643
The Social Lives of Numbers: Statistics, Reform and the Remaking of Rural Life in Turkey (Book)Title: The Social Lives of Numbers: Statistics, Reform and the Remaking of Rural Life in Turkey
Author: Brian Silverstein
Abstract: This book examines the changing role of statistics in institutional reform in Turkey, and the unanticipated ways in which such changes transform livelihoods as well. Turkish agriculture is undergoing its most profound transformation since the establishment of the Republic in the 1920s. Seemingly minor technical adjustments in farmers’ reporting requirements and practices to collect better data on agriculture for statistics are also having a rapid and massive effect on farmers’ practices and livelihoods. The attempt to understand agriculture in Turkey in new ways is changing agriculture itself. The relationship between statistics and social and natural phenomena is thus performative, and such performativity undergirds a great deal of socio-technical change in the world. Drawing on fieldwork in Turkey with statisticians, farmers and agricultural extension technicians, the book shows how alongside deliberation about reforms, it is in and through this performativity that much of the work of institutional commensuration actually happens.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9789811591952Primary URL Description: publishers presentation
Secondary URL:
https://cmes.arizona.edu/news/social-lives-numbers-brian-silverstein%E2%80%99s-new-book-studies-impact-statistics-turkish-agricultureSecondary URL Description: University of Arizona publicity
Access Model: purchase
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 97898115919
Spatial Structure and Stratigraphy at Second-Millennium BCE Kaymakçı (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Spatial Structure and Stratigraphy at Second-Millennium BCE Kaymakçı
Abstract: For many years western Anatolia was one of the least known cultural landscapes in the second–millennium BCE eastern Mediterranean, overshadowed by its better-known neighbors in Hittite central Anatolian and Minoan and Mycenaean cultural spheres. Owing to the efforts of recent decades, it is becoming possible to grasp the character of western Anatolian identity, or rather identities, as well as their place(s) in the Bronze Age world. The citadel site of Kaymakci with its broad exposure and relatively short term of use has brought new understanding of the culture and role of the region in the Bronze Age.
Author: Christopher Roosevelt
Date: 4/16/2021
Location: online
Primary URL:
https://anamed.ku.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WANAT_Program.pdfPrimary URL Description: Link to the program of the online symposium on Western Anatolia.
Secondary URL:
https://anamed.ku.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WANAT_OZETLER_ABSTRACTS_FINAL.pdfSecondary URL Description: Link to program abstracts.
The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community (Book)Title: The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community
Author: Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Abstract: This monograph explores the transformation of the Kizilbash from a radical religio-political movement to a religious order of closed communities.
It offers the first comprehensive social history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities. The study combines conventional sources with newly discovered ones generated within the Kizilbash-Alevi milieu. The author argues for a readjustment in focus from pre-Islamic Central Asia to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of the Middle East when exploring genealogies of popular Islam in Anatolia. The study offers a critical assessment of the long-standing Köprülü paradigm in the field of religious and cultural history of Anatolia,
provides a new perspective on the Ottoman-Safavid conflict, and on Sunni-Shiʿi confessionalisation in the early modern period. Finally, this work opens new avenues of research in the study of other ‘heterodox’ communities in the Islamic world
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-kizilbash-alevis-in-ottoman-anatolia.htmlPrimary URL Description: publisher's presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: Edinburgh Univeristy Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781474432696
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Prizes
SERMEISS Book Award, 2020
Date: 7/8/2020
Organization: Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society
Abstract: This prize recognizes a peer-reviewed nonfiction work of outstanding scholarship published in English that exhibits original empirical and theoretical contributions in Middle Eastern or Islamic studies in any academic discipline in the social sciences or humanities from any time period.
Heritage, World Heritage, and the Future: Perspectives on Scale, Conservation, and Dialogue (Book)Title: Heritage, World Heritage, and the Future: Perspectives on Scale, Conservation, and Dialogue
Author: Nilgun Oz
Author: Christina Luke
Abstract: The papers published in this volume were among those presented at the 14th International ANAMED Annual Symposium (IAAS), held at Istanbul’s Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in 2019. Bringing together archaeologists and heritage professionals from diverse backgrounds engaged in the conservation of archaeological and natural sites, the symposium focused on topics of heritage conservation and development in Turkey, with a particular focus on World Heritage Sites.
The papers explore the conservation and future of archaeological and natural heritage, including but not limited to the World Heritage Convention and its application in Turkey, site conservation and financing of conservation work, community engagement during archaeological research, and public perceptions of archaeology. Providing reflection on and critical assessment of their own work, the authors discuss both achievements and problems to create a clearer picture of what works and what does not work in certain conditions.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo160641898.htmlPrimary URL Description: publisher's presentation through the University of Chicago Press
Access Model: book
Publisher: Koc University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9786057685865
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Reassessing the Route to the Armenian Genocide (June 1913-April 1915) (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Reassessing the Route to the Armenian Genocide (June 1913-April 1915)
Abstract: The Armenian Genocide of 1915 is one of the most horrifying tragedies of the twentieth century. The exterminationist campaign caught its victims in total shock, who lacked any preparations to stand against or avoid it. As I show in my broader research the catastrophe occurred immediately after a period when the Ottoman Armenian communities and their political elites were the most optimistic about the prospects of the Armenian people in the empire. Even after the First World War broke out, the commonly held view among the leading Armenian circles was that “before the Armenian people was rising a new, unlimited and fascinating horizon.”
Author: Yektan Turkyilmaz
Date: 02/24/2022
Location: Central European University, Vienna campus
Primary URL:
https://events.ceu.edu/node/10721Primary URL Description: event announcement