Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul invites you to Voices of Emerging Scholars webinar series’ second session of the Fall 2022 term, titled “Science, Self, and State.” The webinar will shift the focus toward early modern Ottoman realities. From the authority of astrologers as history writers to the dream narratives of sultans and debates on kingship and state formation, papers offer fresh insights into the socio-political and cultural history of the early modern Ottoman empire.
Starting as a Covid-19 project, the Voices of Emerging Scholars created a platform, which presented new research in Ottoman-Turkish studies to a wide network of scholars and students worldwide. The resulting papers of the previous year were published in The Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies.
This academic year, the webinars will be coordinated by Zeynep Çelik, Sakıp Sabancı Visiting Professor, and A. Tunç Şen, Assistant Professor of History, and cover a broader chronological span from the early modern to the late Ottoman and Early Republican periods.
Presenters:
Maryam Patton is a Ph.D. candidate in the dual History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University. Her dissertation focuses on the social and cultural history of time in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Istanbul and Venice. Her broader interests lie in cross-cultural transmission in the Early Modern Mediterranean, especially in the fields of book history and the history of science. She received her MPhil in European History in 2016 from Oxford, where she was an Ertegun Scholar. She holds a BA in History from Princeton.
Rao Mohsin Ali Noor was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and received a BA (Hons) in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2014. He received his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) from the University of Chicago in 2022 and is currently an assistant professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. His current book project, titled Cosmic Sovereignties: The Embodied Turn in Ottoman Religion and Politics, explores the transformation of early modern Ottoman religio-political and religio-social thought and practice between the late 16th and early 18th centuries.
Yasin Arslantaş received his Ph.D. in Economic History from the London School of Economics in 2018, and his M.A. in History from Bilkent University in 2013. He is currently teaching economic history at Anadolu University. Specializing in social and economic history broadly defined, his earlier work focused on religio-political discourse, the political economy of confiscations, and religious conversion in the Ottoman Empire. Among his current interests are the production and dissemination of useful knowledge and the rise of mass education in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey.
Discussant:
Derin Terzioğlu received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999 and is an Associate Professor of History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. She has published various articles on early modern Ottoman religious, cultural and intellectual history and co-edited, together with Tijana Krstić, two collective volumes, Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c.1750 (Brill, 2021) and Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th -18th Centuries (GorgiasPress, 2022). She is also one of the editors of Brill’s “Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage” (OEH) series.
