Notes on Contributors
Iris Agmon
is a historian of the Ottoman Empire. She completed her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and joined the department of Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University. Her research interests include the Ottoman legal system, particularly the Ottoman sharia court, and legal reforms during the long nineteenth century; a socio-legal history of late- and post-Ottoman Palestine; family history; microhistory; historiography; and historical thinking. Her book, Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (2006) explores the sharia courts of late-Ottoman Jaffa and Haifa. Her current research project focuses on the Ottoman family code (1917).
Antonis Anastasopoulos
is an associate professor of Ottoman History in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Crete and a collaborating faculty member at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas. He has edited or co-edited five books and has published more than thirty-five articles in academic journals and edited books with a focus on Ottoman provincial societies and their relations with the state, and on Islamic tombstones.
Tülay Artan
is an associate professor of history at Sabancı University, Istanbul. She works on the prosopographical networks and households of the Ottoman elite; material culture, the history of consumption and standards of living; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman arts, architecture and literature from a comparative perspective. Her most recent publications include “Early-eighteenth Century Depictions of Women in Distress”, Journal of Medieval History (2019); “Cosmopolitanism in the Early Eighteenth-century Ottoman Capital: The Impostor, the Alchemist, the Merchant and the Personal Dimension”, in R. Gradeva (ed.) The Balkan Provinces of the Ottoman Empire: The Personal Dimension. I. The Agents of Faith (Sofia: AUB Press, 2019); and “Contemplation or Amusement? The Light Shed by Ruznames on an Ottoman Spectacle of 1740–1750”, in K. Fleet and E. Boyar (eds), The Ottomans and Entertainment (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas
received her MA degree in History from Sabancı University in 2005. In her first year as a master’s student at Sabancı, she took a course on Sources and Methods for Ottoman History, 1450–1600 and her instructor was Metin Kunt. She received her Ph.D. degree in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2014.
Karl K. Barbir
is professor emeritus of history at Siena College, Loudonville, New York, USA. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut; and a master’s and doctorate from Princeton University. He is the author of Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708–1758, a contributor to Jane Hathaway, The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800, and co-edited (with Baki Tezcan) Identity and Identify Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz.
Fatih Bayram
was born in Samsun in 1974 and graduated from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University in 1997. In 2000, he received a Master’s degree from Bilkent University for his thesis on “Ebubekir Ratib Efendi as an Ottoman Envoy of Knowledge between the East and the West” and, in 2008, a Ph.D., also from Bilkent, for his dissertation entitled “Zaviye-Khankahs and Religious Orders in the Province of Karaman: Seljukid, Karamanid and Ottoman Periods, 1200–1512”. He is now assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Medeniyet University.
Suraiya Faroqhi
is a professor at the newly founded Ibn Haldun University in Başakşehir, Istanbul. She was an undergraduate at Istanbul University, but has also studied at the Indiana University in Bloomington, where she acquired an MA for teachers, and at the University of Hamburg, from where she has a Ph.D. She completed her studies in 1970. Before becoming a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, she spent sixteen years (1971–87) at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She works on the Ottoman social history of the early modern period and has a special interest in merchants, as well as in artisans and their handiwork.
Cornell H. Fleischer
is the Kanuni Süleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âli (1986; Turkish translation 1996). His recent publications include “A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” (Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 61 (1–2) 2018, 18–90). One current project, among others, is a re-evaluation of the ‘Ottoman’ world of the fifteenth century through the work of ʿAbd al-rahman al-Bistâmi (d.1454).
Pál Fodor
is director general of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, editor of The Hungarian Historical Review (Budapest), co-editor of Archivum Ottomanicum (Wiesbaden), and series editor of 21st-Century Studies in Humanities and Monumenta Hungariae Historica (Budapest). He has published extensively on the military, administrative, and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire, as well as on Ottoman politics towards central Europe. Among his many publications are In Quest of the Golden Apple: Imperial Ideology, Politics and Military Administration in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Isis, 2000); The Unbearable Weight of Empire: The Ottomans in Central Europe (Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2015 and 2016); and The Business of State: Ottoman Finance Administration and Ruling Elites in Transition, 1580s–1615 (Berlin: Klaus-Schwarz-Verlag, 2018).
Mehmet Kalpaklı
is the chair of the departments of both History and Turkish Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He specializes in Ottoman literature and the cultural history of the Ottoman Empire. He is also working on several digital humanities projects. His publications include (with Walter G. Andrews) The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman Turkish and European Literature, Culture, and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); an expanded edition (with Walter Andrews and Najaat Black) of Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); and Osmanlı Divan Şiiri Üzerine Metinler (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Press, 1999).
Seyfi Kenan
completed his primary, secondary and undergraduate education in Istanbul before going to New York City in 1994 to pursue his doctoral studies at Columbia University. As research coordinator at Columbia University, he engaged in a number of research projects in both the Humanities and Middle Eastern Studies (1996–2003). He uses an interdisciplinary method with a concentration on the history of comparative intellectual thought, the educational sciences and philosophy. He returned to Istanbul in 2003, and is currently full-time professor at Marmara University in Istanbul. Dr Kenan is also managing editor of the Journal of Ottoman Studies. Since 1990, he has been a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Islam (44 volumes with nearly 17,000 entries) covering socio-history of the Islamic religion, culture and civilization published by ISAM Publications. He has engaged in research, overseen projects or taught classes in Cairo, New York, Beijing, Copenhagen, London and Vienna. He was awarded a Senior Fellowship at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey for the autumn and spring terms of 2014/15. Among his interests are how to understand and study other cultures and societies, and realms of interactions between the Islamic world, especially the Ottomans and Europe, and the formation of modern Turkish educational thought.
Cemil Koçak
graduated from Ankara University with a BA in political science in 1978, an MA in 1980, and a Ph.D. in public administration and political science from the university’s Social Sciences Institute in 1986. Between 1984 and 1999 he worked for the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey and was appointed manager of its publications department and a member of its publications commission from 1993 to 1999. His research interests are in Turkish political history, Turkish foreign policy, historical writing and methodology. Since 1999 he has been at the Sabanci University in Istanbul/Turkey and is a founding member of the Economic and Social History Foundation of Turkey.
Harun Küçük
is an associate professor of History and Sociology of Science and the incoming director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in History and Science Studies from the University of California – San Diego (2012). Küçük’s recent book, Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660–1732 focuses on the relationship between science and the economy in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Currently, he is writing a book about the temporal order of scientific labour in the modern academy. He is also part of the ERC-funded project ‘Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities’. Together with Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, he is co-editing a primary source reader on Ottoman science.
Aslı Niyazioğlu
is Associate Professor in Ottoman History at the University of Oxford. She is an early modern historian working on literature, Sufism and urban life. Her publications include Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth Century Biographer’s Perspective (London: Routledge, 2017) and “How to Read an Ottoman Poet’s Dream? Friends, Patrons and the Execution of Figani (d.1532)”, Middle Eastern Literatures 16 (1) 2013, 48–60. Currently, she is working on a book entitled “Early Modern Istanbul Imagined: A City of Poets, Sufis and Travellers”, which aims to explore the role of imagination in the making of urban communities in early modern Istanbul.
Mehmet Öz
graduated from the Department of History at Hacettepe University in Ankara with a BA in 1981 and an M.Phil. in 1985. In 1991, he received a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge, UK. He is currently Professor of History at Hacettepe University. He has published many articles on various aspects of Ottoman history from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and is the single author of five books and editor or co-editor of a further six. He served as the vice-chairman of Turkish Historical Society between 2010 and 2012 and acted as the Dean of the Faculty of Letters at Hacettepe University between 2013 and 2016.
Kaya Şahin
is associate professor of history at Indiana University, with adjunct appointments in the departments of Central Eurasian Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. He is the author of Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World (2013; Turkish translation 2014). His recent publications include “Staging an Empire: An Ottoman Circumcision Ceremony as Cultural Performance”, American Historical Review 123 (2) April 2018, 463–92. He is currently working on a biography of the Ottoman sultan Süleyman (r.1520–66), and a history of Ottoman public ceremonies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE.
Selçuk Akşin Somel
teaches history at Sabancı University, Istanbul and received his doctorate from Bamberg University, Germany, in 1993. His research interests include Ottoman education, women and gender, bureaucracy, and peripheral populations. He is author of The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire (1839–1908): Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline (Brill 2001); Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire (Scarecrow Press 2003, 2nd edn 2012); and, with co-authors Amy Singer and Christoph Neumann, Untold Histories from the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries (Routledge 2010). Forthcoming publications include (with Mehmet Beşikçi and Alexandre Toumarkine) Not All Quiet on the Ottoman Fronts: Neglected Perspectives on a Global War, 1914–1918 (Ergon Verlag 2021) and, with Kaori Komatsu, Edhem Eldem and others, Modernity Alla Turca: Ottoman Military, Education, and Welfare, 1826–1923 (Academic Studies Press 2022).
Derin Terzioğlu
is an associate professor at Boğaziçi University’s Department of History, and holds a Ph.D. in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University (1999). Terzioğlu specializes in the history of the early modern Ottoman Empire, with research interests spanning the social and political history of religion, history of political thought, history of books and reading, and history of childhood and family. Currently, Terzioğlu, together with Tijana Krstić of the Central European University, is co-writing a book that synthesizes the findings of the ERC-funded research project, ‘The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–17th Centuries’.
Christine Woodhead
is Honorary Fellow in the Department of History, University of Durham, where she taught early-modern Ottoman history for several years. She is editor of The Ottoman World (2012) and author of several articles on Ottoman literary historiography and more recently on seventeenth-century letter collections.
N. Zeynep Yelçe
is a researcher and instructor at the Foundations Development Directorate and coordinator for humanities courses at Sabanci University, Istanbul. She completed her MA thesis (Ideal Kingship in the Late Medieval World: The Ottoman Case, 2003) and her Ph.D. dissertation (The Making of Sultan Süleyman: A Study of Process/es of Image-Making and Reputation-Management, 2009) at Sabanci University with Metin Kunt as her adviser. Her research interests include early modern power structures, court studies, and ritual studies. She is currently working on news and information networks in the Mediterranean in the first half of sixteenth century.
Elizabeth A. Zachariadou
As the editors of this volume, we include this chapter with deep reverence to the author, Elizabeth Zachariadou, who sadly passed away in 2018. It would be appropriate, we thought, to include a short obituary for this meticulous and fair historian who contributed significantly to Ottoman studies. Elizabeth Zachariadou (1931–2018) studied at the University of Athens and SOAS, London. She worked for many years in Montreal, Canada, before moving to the University of Crete, where she taught from 1985 to 1998; she was a member of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH. While the main focus of Zachariadou’s work was on the late Byzantine, early and ‘classical’ period of the Ottomans, she also wrote on the history of seventeenth-century Aegean islands, especially Crete. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ankara (1990) and was honoured with membership of the Academia Europaea (1993). As an acknowledgment of her contribution to the field, volume 23 of the Archivum Ottomanicum (2005/6) and the proceedings of the Halcyon Days in Crete VI symposium (2008) were dedicated to her and collections of her papers were published twice as part of the Variorum series – Romania and the Turks (c.1300–c.1500) (1985) and Studies in pre-Ottoman Turkey and the Ottomans (2007). We greatly appreciate Marinos Sariyannis’ generous help in compiling this short obituary.