Ottoman History Podcast

with Karen Pinto

hosted by Nir Shafir

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series
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Hundreds of cartographic images of the world and its regions exist scattered throughout collections of medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts. The sheer number of these extant maps tells us that from the thirteenth century onward, when these map-manuscripts began to proliferate, visually depicting the world became a major preoccupation of medieval Muslim scholars. However, these cartographers did not strive for mimesis, that is, representation or imitation of the real world. These schematic, geometric, and often symmetrical images of the world are iconographic representations—‘carto-ideographs’—of how medieval Muslim cartographic artists and their patrons perceived their world and chose to represent and disseminate this perception. In this podcast, we sit down with Karen Pinto to discuss the maps found in the cartographically illustrated Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms) tradition, which is the first known geographic atlas of maps, its influence on Ottoman cartography, and how basic versions of these carto-ideographs were transported back to villages and far-flung areas of the Islamic empire.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Karen Pinto is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boise State University. She specializes in the history of Islamic cartography and its intersections between Ottoman, European, and other world cartographic traditions (see academia.edu)
	Nir Shafir is a doctoral candidate at UCLA studying Ottoman intellectual history (see academia.edu)

CREDITS

Episode No. 220
Release Date: 12 January 2016
Recording Location: Brown University
Editing by Onur Engin (funded by a paid assistantship at Koç University under the supervision of Nina Ergin)
Music and sound samples: Bekir Sıdkı - Lerzan ediyor ruhumu cesmindeki efsun; BBC Sound Effects Vol.46 - Istanbul; Selma Sağbaş - Cok surmedi gecti tarab-i sevk-i baharim
Images courtesy of Leiden University Library

Classic Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik world map, ‘Ṣūrat al-Arḍ’ (Picture of the World) from an abbreviated copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī's Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms). 589/1193. Mediterranean. Gouache and ink on paper. Diameter 37.5 cm. Courtesy: Leiden University Libraries. Cod. Or. 3101, ff. 4-5.

Map of Mediterranean from an abbreviated copy of al-Iṣṭakhrī's Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms).Jabal al-Qilāl, a possible symbol for the mythical “Pillars of Hercules that guards the mouth of the Mediterranean in all KMMS maps. This version is decorated with dark red inverted crescents. 589/1193. Mediterranean. Gouache and ink on paper. 34 x 26 cm. Leiden: Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS. Or. 3101, f. 33a

SELECT PUBLICATIONS OF KAREN PINTO

Karen Pinto
Medieval Islamic Maps
University of Chicago Press, 2016

Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)

“Passion and conflict: Medieval Islamic views of the West" in Mapping Medieval Geographies, ed. Keith Lilley, (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 201-224.

“Searchin’ his eyes, lookin’ for traces: Piri Reis’ World Map of 1513 & Its Islamic Iconographic Connections (A Reading Through Bağdat 334 and Proust),” Journal of Ottoman Studies, 39:1, 2012, 63-94.

"The Maps Are The Message: Mehmet II’s Patronage of an ‘Ottoman Cluster,’"Imago Mundi, 63:2, 2011, 155-179.

with Keith David Watenpaugh

hosted by Chris Gratien

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In comparison with the historiography of other world regions, class has often been an ignored aspect of the history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. This has been especially true with regard to the middle class. But as our guest Keith Watenpaugh has argued in Being Modern in the Middle East, the middle class emerged as a discrete segment of late Ottoman society represented by businessmen, professionals, educators, and writers who engaged robustly with ideas concerning modernity and nationalism and contributed greatly to the making of post-Ottoman societies. In this interview, Prof. Watenpaugh reflects on his research regarding Ottoman and post-Ottoman Aleppo and the historiography of modernity and class in the Middle East roughly a decade after Being Modern's publication, and we explore possible directions for further inquiry.

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PARTICIPANTS

Keith David Watenpaugh is Professor and Director of the University of California, Davis Human Rights Studies Program. A UCLA-trained historian, he is author of Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism(California, 2015) and Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton, 2006) and articles in the American Historical Review, Social History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, Chronicle of Higher Education, Ayrıntı Dergi, Jadaliyya & Huffington Post.

Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.

CREDITS

Episode No. 237
Release Date: 8 April 2016
Recording Location: Aynalıçeşme, Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro music
Sound excerpts: Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Image via Library of Congress

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Keith David Watenpaugh
Being Modern in the Middle East
Princeton University Press, 2006

Anderson, Betty S. The American University of Beirut Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Arsan, Andrew. Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa. 2014.

Brummett, Palmira Johnson. Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Davis, Eric. Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Der Matossian, Bedross. Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire. 2014.

Fortna, Benjamin C. Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Gelvin, James L. Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Gualtieri, Sarah. Between Arab and White Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian-American Diaspora. CA: University of California Press, 2009.

Hanna, Nelly. In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

Kayalı, Hasan. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Khater, Akram Fouad. Inventing Home Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Khoury, Philip S. Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

López, A. Ricardo, and Barbara Weinstein. The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Provence, Michael. The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Seikaly, Sherene. Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine. 2016.

Thompson, Elizabeth. Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights and Paternal Privilige in French Syria and Lebanon. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.

with Kishwar Rizvi

hosted by Chris Gratien

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As spaces fundamental to Muslim religious and communal life, mosques have historically served as sites of not just architectural but also ideological construction. As our guest Kishwar Rizvi argues in her latest book entitled The Transnational Mosque (UNC Press 2015), states operating in transnational contexts have taken a leading role in the building of mosques and in doing so, they forge political, economic, and architectural networks that span the globe. In this episode, we discuss the architectural exports of the four states covered in Prof. Rizvi's monograph: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to situating and comparing transnational mosques of different states, we give special attention to the rise of Neo-Ottoman architecture in modern Turkey and its role in re-branding Turkey's image on the global stage.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "The Visual Past."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Kishwar Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University. She writes on issues of religion, politics, and self-representation in the early modern period, as well as on the intersection of nationalism and architecture in the modern Middle East.
	Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.

CREDITS

Episode No. 244
Release Date: 2 July 2016
Recording Location: Yale University
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Egil Daglar Ustunden Asam - Viktoriya Hanim; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro music and to Muhtelif for the use of "Ta Paidia & Lamma Bada"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Kishwar Rizvi
Additional photographs courtesy of Leili Vatani

IMAGES

Kocatepe Mosque, Ankara (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Sayyidah Ruqayya Mosque, Damascus (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque, Damascus (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Al Noor Mosque (on left), Sharjah (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Türk Şehitlik Mosque, Berlin (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque, Beirut (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Interior of Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque, Beirut (Photo credit: Kishwar Rizvi)

Blue Mosque, Yerevan (Photo credit: Leili Vatani)

Seyhan River with Sabancı Central Mosque in the distance, Adana (Photo credit: Leili Vatani)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kishwar Rizvi
The Transnational Mosque
University of North Carolina Press, 2015

Ersan, Gökhan . “Secularism, Islamism, Emblemat: The Visual Discourse of Progress in Turkey.” Design Issues 23 (2007): 66-82.

Gall, Carlotta. "How Kosovo Was Turned into Fertile Ground for Isis." New York Times (21 May 2016).

Holod, Renata and Hasan Uddin Khan. Mosque and the Modern World: Architects, Patrons and Designs Since the 1950s. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Pinto, Paulo G. “Pilgrimage, Commodities, and Religious Objectification: The Making of Transnational Shiism between Iran and Syria,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007): 109-125.

Rizvi, Kishwar. “Religious Icon and National Symbol: The Tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.” Muqarnas: Journal of Islamic Art and Architecture 20 (2003).

Rizvi, Kishwar. The Transnational Mosque: Architecture and Historical Memory in the Contemporary Middle East. 2015.

Rizvi, Kishwar and Sandy Isenstadt, eds. Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

Tabbaa, Yasser. “Invented Pieties: The Rediscovery and Rebuilding of the Shrine of Sayyida Ruqayya in Damascus, 1975-2006.” Artibus Asiae 67 (2007): 95-112.

White, Jenny B. “Islam and politics in contemporary Turkey.” In Turkey in the Modern World, edited by Reşat Kasaba, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

with Paolo Girardelli

hosted by Emily Neumeier

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In the classical Ottoman period, European embassies in Istanbul pretty much looked like any other residential building. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, a period of dramatic geo-political and social change, official foreign residences likewise underwent a process of transformation. Architectural designs shifted from Ottoman to Western styles, and these landmarks became increasingly prominent and visible in the urban landscape. In this episode, Emily Neumeier speaks with Paolo Girardelli about how Pera became the “district of diplomacy” in the Ottoman capital, the subject of his forthcoming book project, Landscapes of the Eastern Question: Architecture and Identity in Galata, Pera, and the Bosphorus, 1774-1919.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "The Visual Past."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

Paolo Girardelli is Associate Professor of History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He is an art and architectural historian, working especially on European and non-Muslim presence in the late Ottoman cities. His publications and graduate seminars focus on the relation between space, visuality, diplomacy, religion and communal identities in the multi-cultural contexts of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Emily Neumeier is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at University of Pennsylvania. Her research concerns the art and architecture of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. She is currently preparing a thesis on the architectural patronage of provincial notables in Ottoman Greece and Albania. Emily is also editor of stambouline, a site where travel and the Ottoman world meet.

CREDITS

Episode No. 245
Release Date: 5 July 2016
Recording Location: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Istanbul'dan Ayva Gelir Nar Gelir - Azize Tozem and Sari Recep; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; Katibim (Uskudar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro music
Images and bibliography courtesy of Paolo Girardelli

IMAGES

Lithograph view of Istanbul from Pera, with (from right to left) the Russian, French and Austrian embassies. Lithograph by Jean Brindesi, published in Souvenir de Constantinople (1855).

Broomhall House, Lord Elgin’s family seat in Scotland. Drawing by Thomas Harrison, 1799.

“The Residence of the English Ambassador at Pera, Constantinople.” Engraving.

The colonnades of the Palais de France in 1797. Engraving by A.L. Castellan, published in Lettres sur Constantinople (1811).

Gaspare Fossati’s project for the new Russian Embassy in Pera. Published in Pedrini’s Stanga’s Gaspare Fossati, p. 96.

Detail of a diorama showing the Russian embassy. Migirdic Melkon, 1850, Istanbul Deniz Müzesi.

British Summer Embassy in Tarabya. Photography by Abdullah Frères, ca. 1880-1893, US Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699690/.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berridge, Geoff. British Diplomacy in Turkey, 1583 to the Present: A Study in the Evolution of the Resident
Embassy. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2009.

Casa, Jean-Michel. Le Palais de France à Istanbul/İstanbul’da bir Fransız Sarayı: Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995.

Girardelli, Paolo. “Power or Leisure? Remarks on the Architecture of the European Summer Embassies on the Bosphorus Shore.” New Perspectives on Turkey 50 (2014), 29-58.

Pinon, Pierre. “Résidences de France dans l’Empire ottoman: notes sur l’architecture domestique,” in Les villes dans l’Empire ottoman: activités et societés, ed. Daniel Panzac, vol. 2 (Paris: CNRS, 1994), 47-84.

Yurdusev, A. Nuri ed. Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional?. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

with Lorenz Korn

hosted by Emily Neumeier and Sotirios Dimitriadis

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The fountain standing in the Hippodrome (At Meydanı) in Istanbul, located just a few steps away from some of Turkey’s most famous tourist attractions like Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, doesn’t attract much notice these days. But wrapped up in this monument, gifted to the people of the city by the German Emperor Wilhelm II, is a story that sheds some light on the bilateral relations between the Ottoman Empire and their European neighbors before WWI. What is the role that the arts play in this diplomatic relationship? Under what conditions could such an object be inserted in the topography of Istanbul’s historic monuments? In this episode, Emily Neumeier and Sotirios Dimitriadis speak with Lorenz Korn about his research on the imperial fountain, tracing the process of its design, construction and reception.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "The Visual Past."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Lorenz Korn is an art historian and archaeologist of the Islamic world. Since 2003, he has served as full professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Bamberg. His research focuses on the architecture of the central Islamic lands between the 10th and 16th centuries, Islamic minor arts such as metalwork, and Arabic epigraphy. His recent publications include articles and books on the architecture of the mosque and on artistic exchange between Europe and the Islamic World.
	Emily Neumeier is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at University of Pennsylvania. Her research concerns the art and architecture of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. She is currently preparing a thesis on the architectural patronage of provincial notables in Ottoman Greece and Albania. Emily is also editor of stambouline, a site where travel and the Ottoman world meet.
	Sotirios Dimitriadis is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire, whose research focuses on issues of urban and social history. He completed his doctoral dissertation in the School of Oriental and African Studies, at the University of London, and is currently teaching at the International Hellenic University.

CREDITS

Episode No. 246
Release Date: 8 July 2016
Recording Location: University of Bamberg
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Istanbul'dan Ayva Gelir Nar Gelir - Azize Tozem and Sari Recep; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Muhtelif for allowing us to use "Bint El Shalabiya" in the outro music
Images and bibliography courtesy of Lorenz Korn

IMAGES

The Imperial Fountain or “Kaiserbrunnen” as it stands today, Istanbul. Photo: Lorenz Korn, 2015.

Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Empress at the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, Postcard, 1898. From Carmel (1999).

One of the proposed designs for the fountain by Max Spitta. Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin, Inv. 16886

Telegram letter conveying the donation of a public fountain to the population of Istanbul by Wilhelm II, 22 October 1898. Berlin, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, R3732.

Detail of the gold mosaic and imperial insignia in the dome of the Kaiserbrunnen. Photo: Lorenz Korn, 2014.

Mosaic decoration in the vaults of Hagia Sophia. From W. Salzenberg, Alt-christliche Baudenkmäler von Constantinopel (Berlin 1854).

The inauguration ceremony for the fountain. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Istanbul Photo Archive, Neg.Nr.9631.

Historic postcard featuring the fountain in the Hippodrome (At Meydanı). Image in the Public Domain, US Library of Congress.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baytar, İlona (Ed.). İki Dost Hükümdar. Sultan II. Abdülhamid – Kaiser II. Wilhelm. Zwei befreundete Herrscher, Exhibition catalog. Istanbul: Milli Saraylar, 2009. [An exhibition catalogue with articles around Ottoman-German relations and the personal relationship between Abdülhamid and Wilhelm; includes an article on the fountain by Nurcan Yazıcı]

Carmel, Alex [Karmel, Aleks] and Ejal Jakob Eisler. Der Kaiser reist ins Heilige Land. Die Palästinareise Wilhelms II. 1898. Eine illustrierte Dokumentation. Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer, 1999. [Photographs, postcards, and other material visualizing the imperial visit to Constantinople and the Holy Land]

Çelik, Zeynep. The Remaking of Istanbul. Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century. 2nd ed. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1993.

Krüger, Jürgen. Rom und Jerusalem. Kirchenbauvorstellungen der Hohenzollern im 19. Jahrhundert (Acta humaniora). Berlin 1995. [A study of revivalist styles in Prussian church architecture of the 19th century, relevant for the sources of the fountain’s design]

with Hoda Yousef

hosted by Graham Pitts

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During the late nineteenth century, Egyptian society witnessed the rise of new debates and practices concerning reading and writing in the Arabic language. In this episode, Hoda Yousef explores the discources surrounding literacy in Egypt, which is the subject of her first book entitled Composing Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016). This work examines how different actors from Islamic modernists and feminists to journalists and officials sought to produce particular kinds of Egyptians through language politics. Dr. Yousef demonstrates that emergent practices of reading and writing had impacts well beyond the conventionally-defined literate circles. Even for those who did not read and write, the written word became an important part of daily life. Through the medium of public exchange created by the writing, different segments of Egyptian society could engage in discussions regarding nation, home, and belonging.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Hoda Yousef is Assistant Professor of History at Denison University. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of language, literacy, education, and gender in modern Egypt.
	Graham Auman Pitts is a PhD Candidate in Georgetown University's History department, where he studies the environmental history of the modern Middle East. He is currently finishing a dissertation entitled "Fallow Fields: Famine and the Making of Lebanon (1914-1952)," which probes the intersections of ecology, capital, and colonialism.

CREDITS

Episode No. 247
Release Date: 11 July 2016
Recording Location: Georgetown University
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Istanbul'dan Ayva Gelir Nar Gelir - Azize Tozem and Sari Recep; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; Abdel Wahab-Balash--Nile records # 117-B
Images and bibliography courtesy of Hoda Yousef

IMAGES

This image from the 1919 Egyptian revolution highlights the use of symbols that would have been a powerful and effective way to reach the vast majorities of Egyptians who witnessed this show of dissent (Source: Sijill al-Hilāl al-Muṣawwar, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1992), 1:98.)

Photographs of protests held on the same streets during the 1940s and 1950s provide a very different visual landscape. In those protests, banners awash with long statements dominated the processions. Within thirty odd years, public processions and more importantly, public communication, had changed drastically in Egypt. (Source: Sijill al-Hilāl al-Muṣawwar, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1992), 1:134.)

This was a very typical "group" petition sent by a community to the central state in 1915. (Source: Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qawmiyya, Cairo)

This is a printed petition from 1925, consciously addressed not only to "those in power," but also to "public opinion" (Source: Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qawmiyya, Cairo)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Composing Egypt
Hoda A. Yousef
Stanford University Press, 2016

Ayalon, Ami. Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900-1948. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

Baron, Beth. The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Bassiouney, Reem. Language and Identity in Modern Egypt. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Ben-Bassat, Yuval. Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Chalcraft, John T. The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Collins, James, and Richard Blot. Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Fahmy, Ziad. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Fortna, Benjamin C. Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Gully, Adrian. “Arabic Linguistic Issues and Controversies of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Journal of Semitic Studies 42 (1997): 75–120.

Hanna, Nelly. “Literacy and the ‘Great Divide’ in the Islamic World, 1300-1800.” Journal of Global History 2, no. 2 (2007): 175–93.

Hatem, Mervat F. Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of ʿAʾisha Taymur. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Russell, Mona. “Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas: Egyptian Education under British Occupation, 1882-1922.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 21, nos. 1 & 2 (2001): 50–60.

Ryzova, Lucie. The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Sajdi, Dana. The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Sedra, Paul. From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Suleiman, Yasir. The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Vincent, David. The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Cambridge, England: Polity, 2000.

with Liat Kozma

hosted by Chris Gratien and Susanna Ferguson

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With political and economic developments in 19th century Egypt, the lives of women began to change in dramatic ways. From the rise of wage labor and the restructuring of rural households to the emergence of women's movements and publications, pre-colonial Egypt witnessed numerous transformation in the realm of gender. In this episode, Liat Kozma shares her research regarding some of the most marginalized women in Egyptian society during this period of change. Manumitted slaves, doctors and midwives, factory employees, and sex workers were some groups of women who left many historical traces in the police, court, and medical records of the Khedival government.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World."

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PARTICIPANTS

	Liat Kozma is a senior lecturer at the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies, the Hebrew University. She is currently working on a book manuscript on regulated prostitution in the interwar Middle East and North Africa.
	Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.
	Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939."

CREDITS

Episode No. 248
Release Date: 14 July 2016
Recording Location: Okmeydanı, Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Istanbul'dan Ayva Gelir Nar Gelir - Azize Tozem and Sari Recep; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Image and bibliography courtesy of Liat Kozma
Additional thanks to Seçil Yılmaz

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
courtesy of Liat Kozma

Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law and Medicine in Khedival Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011.

Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 – was groundbreaking at the time of its publication, and still unmatched in depth and scope.

On gender and slavery in nineteenth century Egypt, see Ehud Toledano, As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East. New Haven, Con.: Yale University Press, 2007; Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan. Berkeley: California University Press, 2003; and more recently her Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012; as well as Terence Walz and Kenneth M.Cuno (eds.), Race and slavery in the Middle East: histories of trans-Saharan Africans in nineteenth-century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010.

Khaled Fahmy's works on nineteenth-century legal reform and its medical and forensic components are highly recommended:

“Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, ed. Eugene Rogan. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002; “Medicine and Power: Towards a Social History of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” Cairo Papers in the Social Sciences, Volume 23, No. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 1-45; “The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Criminal Law in nineteenth-century Egypt,” Islamic Law and Society, 6 (1999), pp. 224-271. (An updated Arabic translation appeared in Justice Between Shari‘a and Reality in Egypt During the Ottoman Era, ed. Nasser Ibrahim and Emad Hilal, Cairo: Egyptian Historical Society, 2002, pp. 213-270; “Women, Medicine and Power in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 35-72.

Another reading of virginity and defloration see Mario M. Ruiz, "Virginity violated: sexual assault and respectability in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Egypt", Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25 (2005), 214 -226.

with Kathryn Schwartz

hosted by Nir Shafir

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We often regard print as a motor of social change, leaving revolutions in its wake, whether political and religious. For historians of the Middle East, this line of thought always leads to the (predictable) question: why didn’t Muslims or Ottomans or Arabs adopt print? In this episode, Kathryn Schwartz discusses why this question is often poorly posed and then delves into an in-depth look at how and why people used print in one particular historical context—nineteenth-century Cairo. Touching upon topics such Napoleon, Mehmed Ali, and the Bulaq press, we explore how print slowly and haphazardly embedded itself into various aspects of Egyptian learned life. This fresh history casts nineteenth-century Egypt in a new light by examining the technological adaptation of print not as an act of unstoppable and transformative modernity, but as a slow and incremental expansion of already existing practices of book production.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise."

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Kathryn Schwartz is an Arabist and historian of the modern Middle East. She is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow for the Digital Library of the Eastern Mediterranean at Harvard. Kathryn earned her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 2015, and her B.A. in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies from King’s College, the University of Cambridge in 2008. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book entitled "Print and the People of Cairo, 19th century."

Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.

CREDITS

Episode No. 249
Release Date: 15 July 2016
Recording Location: Cambridge, MA
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Egil Daglar Ustunden Asam - Viktoriya Hanim; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro music
Images and bibliography courtesy of Kathryn Schwartz

IMAGES

Detail of a photograph depicting Azharites reading what are likely manuscripts and printings, Cairo, circa 1880s. Source: Abdullah Fréres. “Les Éudiants d’el-Azhar (Université Arabe). N ̊65.” Cairo: circa 1880s. Collection of photographs from the nineteenth century from the private collection of Dr. Mohammed B. Alwan.

The first edition of the Egyptian Gazette printed in 1828, beside a proclamation from the French invasion of Egypt (1798-1801) printed in 1798. Source: Raḍwān, Abū al-Futūḥ. Tārīkh Maṭbaʻat Būlāq wa Lamḥa fī Tārīkh aṭ-Ṭibāʻa fī Buldān aš-Šarq al-Awsaṭ. Al-Qāhira: al-Maṭbaʻa al-Amīrīya, 1953, Image 27; and Jabartī, ʻAbd ar-Raḥmān and S. Moreh (editor and translator). Al-Jabartī's chronicle of the first seven months of the French occupation of Egypt: Muḥarram-Rajab 1213, 15 June-December 1798: Tārīkh muddat al-Faransīs bi-Miṣr. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975.

Ottoman printing sites before the advent of Cairo’s printing industry. Source: Schwartz, Kathryn. “Meaningful Mediums: A Material and Intellectual History of Manuscript and Print Production in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Cairo.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 2015, 34.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

“AHR Forum. “How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?”” The American Historical Review, 107:1 (2002): 84-128.

Carter, T. F. “Islam as a Barrier to Printing.” The Muslim World 33 (1943): 213-216.

Hanna, Nelly. In Praise of Books: a Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, 16th-18th Century. Syracuse University Press, 2003.

İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin and Humphrey Davies (trans.). The Turks in Egypt and their Cultural Legacy. The American University in Cairo Press, 2012.

Jabartī, ʻAbd ar-Raḥmān, Smuel Moreh (trans.), and Robert Tignor (intro.). Tārīkh Muddat al-Faransīs bi Miṣr; Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabartî's Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation, 1798. M. Wiener, 1993.

Lane, Edward William. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: Written in Egypt During the Years 1833-1835. East-West Publications, 1978.

Roper, Geoffrey (ed.). The History of the Book in the Middle East. Ashgate, 2013.

Sajdi, Dana. “Print and Its Discontents. A Case for Pre-Print Journalism and Other Sundry Print Matters.” The Translator 15:1 (2009): 105-138.

Schwartz, Kathryn. “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?” Book History, forthcoming.

Schwartz, Kathryn. “The Political Economy of Private Printing in Cairo, as Told from a Commissioning Deal Turned Sour, 1871.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, forthcoming.

Strauss, Johann. The Egyptian Connection in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Literary and Intellectual History. Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 2000.

Yousef, Hoda A. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930. 2016.

with Michael Tworek

hosted by Nir Shafir, Polina Ivanova, and Shireen Hamza

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A man known as Wojciech Bobowski to some, Albertus Bobovius to others, and Ali Ufki to yet others, is one of the prime examples of an early modern intermediary operating in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, we discuss with Michael Tworek the fascinating figure of the Bobovius, from his childhood in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to his capture in a Tatar slave raid, to his numerous translations both from and to Ottoman Turkish. These included musical treatises, the translation of the New Testament, the Genevan Psalter and more. In particular, we focus on how Bobovius mediated and developed his image as an inter-imperial mediator to his correspondents in the Republic of Letters.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise."

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	Michael T. Tworek is a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in History in 2014. Michael’s areas of research include the Renaissance in central and eastern Europe, the reception of classical tradition, history of education and travel, and global early modern history. He has series of forthcoming articles on cross-cultural encounters of Polish travelers in China, Italy, Istanbul, and Dutch Brazil and is completing a monograph on the rebirth of cosmopolitanism through travel and learning in sixteenth-century Europe.
	Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
	Polina Ivanova is a Ph.D. Candidate at Harvard University and a 2016-18 Tyler Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her interests include history of the medieval Mediterranean, Anatolia and Iran, as well as archaeology and material culture studies.
	Shireen Hamza is a doctoral student in the History of Science department at Harvard University. Her research focuses broadly on the history of science and medicine in the Islamicate Middle Ages, and more specifically on the history of women's health.

CREDITS

Episode No. 250
Release Date: 24 July 2016
Recording Location: Cambridge, MA
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Special thanks to DÜNYA ensemble for use of "The Psalms of Ali Ufki" in this episode
Bibliography courtesy of Michael Tworek

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cem Behar, Ali Ufkî ve Mezmurlar (Istanbul, 1990)

Albertus Bobovius, Topkapi : Relation du sérail du Grand Seigneur (Paris, 1999)

Hannah Neudecker, “From Istanbul to London? Albertus Bobovius' appeal to Isaac Basire” in Alastair Hamilton, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Bart Westerweel, eds., The Republic of Letters and the Levant (Leiden, 2005), pp. 175-96.

Noel Malcolm, “Comenius, Boyle, Oldenburg, and the Translation of the Bible into Turkish,” Church History and Religious Culture 87, No. 3 (2007): 327-362.

with Eric van Lit

hosted by Nir Shafir and Chris Gratien

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Commentaries are a common, even a nearly ineluctable, part of the textual landscape of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Especially when it came to philosophy, commentaries were perhaps the main venue of discussions. An earlier generation of scholars believed these commentaries to be derivative but we now see them as a major piece in the development of the philosophical tradition in the Middle East. In this podcast, we speak with L.W.C (Eric) van Lit about how to approach these commentaries and their effect on the intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Eric van Lit works on the history of Islamic philosophy and theology, especially of the post-classical period. He wrote a dissertation on the notion of a world of image in Suhrawardī (d. 1191) and his commentators, at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is currently a postdoc at Yale University. You can find more information at www.digitalorientalist.com.
	Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the History Department at UCLA.
	Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.

CREDITS

Episode No. 251
Release Date: 27 July 2016
Recording Location: Yale University
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Muhtelif for allowing us to use "Bint El Shalabiya" in the intro music and Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the outro music
Bibliography courtesy of Eric van Lit

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lit, L.W.C. van, “An Ottoman Commentary Tradition on Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa. Preliminary Observations,” Oriens 43 (2015): 368–413.

Ghazālī, The Incoherence of the Philosophers [= Tahāfut al-falāsifa], Translated by M.E. Marmura, Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2000.

Griffel, F., Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Fazlioğlu, I., “The Samarqand mathematical-astronomical school: A basis for Ottoman philosophy and science,” Journal of the History of Arabic Science 14 (2008): 3–68.

Yücedoğru, T., O. Koloğlu, M. Kılavuz, and K. Gömbeyaz, eds., International Symposium on Khojazada (22-24 October 2010 Bursa): Proceedings, Bursa: Bursa Büyükșehir Belediyesi, 2011.

Ahmed, S., What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Muhanna, E.I., ed., The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

with Nükhet Varlık

hosted by Nir Shafir

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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 Varlık, 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 a 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.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health.

Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the History Department at UCLA.

CREDITS

Episode No. 252
Release Date: 29 July 2016
Recording Location: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer; Katibim (Uskudar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla; Egil Daglar Ustunden Asam - Viktoriya Hanim; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Muhtelif for allowing us to use "Bint El Shalabiya"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Nükhet Varlık

IMAGES

Pieter Coecke van Aelst (Netherlandish, Aelst 1502–1550 Brussels), Detail from a Turkish Funeral from the frieze Ces Moeurs et fachons de faire de Turcz (Customs and Fashions of the Turks), 1553 (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928 - http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/375771)

Ottoman plague trajectories (1453-1600), Nükhet Varlık, “Conquest, Urbanization, and Plague Networks in the Ottoman Empire, 1453-1600,” in The Ottoman World, edited by Christine Woodhead (New York: Routledge, 2011), 257. (Courtesy of Nükhet Varlık)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nükhet Varlık
Plague and Empire
Cambridge University Press, 2015

Ayalon, Yaron. Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Bulmuş, Birsen. Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Campbell, Bruce M. S. The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Gage, Kenneth L., and Michael Y. Kosoy. “Natural History of Plague: Perspectives from More Than a Century of Research.” Annual Review of Entomology 50, no. 1 (2005): 505–28.

Green, Monica H., ed. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death. The Medieval Globe, 1. Kalamazoo: Arc Medieval Press, 2015.

Green, Monica H. and Boris Schmid. “Plague Dialogues: Monica Green and Boris Schmid on Plague Phylogeny (I and II).” Contagions (blog). June 27-29, 2016.

Little, Lester K. “Plague Historians in Lab Coats.” Past and Present 213, no. 1 (2011): 267–90.

McNeill, William Hardy. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976.

Panzac, Daniel. La peste dans l'Empire Ottoman, 1700-1850. Leuven: Éditions Peeters, 1985.

Slack, Paul. Plague: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Varlik, Nükhet. Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

White, Sam. 2010. "Rethinking Disease in Ottoman History". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 42, no. 4: 549-567.

with Sato Moughalian

hosted by Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz

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The styles of Iznik and Kütahya porcelain, which have become synonymous with excellence in Ottoman-Turkish ceramics, adorned and renovated buildings in a radius extending beyond the Anatolian heartland and including Damascus, Mecca, and Cairo. They bear a striking resemblance to the colorful and ornate tiles on many buildings in the city of Jerusalem today, including the Dome of the Rock. This is due to the fact that the iconic ceramics industry of Jerusalem was founded after the First World War by Armenian ceramists who had gotten their start in the resurgent tile industry of late Ottoman Kütahya. As we learn from our guest in this episode, Sato Moughalian, the transfer of this celebrated ceramics tradition from Kütahya to Jerusalem was largely through the figure of David Ohannessian (1884-1953), a master ceramist who came up in the local ceramic arts of the western Anatolian region and received commissions from the likes of Ottoman governors, revivalist architects, and European notables, including Sir Mark Sykes. He survived the travails of deportation to the Syrian desert during WWI only to recreate his art and business in Mandate Palestine. In the podcast, we trace the material history of Ottoman Armenians through the life and journeys of Ohannessian and reflect on the history of Armenian music through some pieces recorded by Moughalian and her colleagues.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "The Visual Past."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	New York flutist Sato Moughalian has a multi-faceted career, performing as a chamber musician, solo and orchestral player, and has recorded widely. In 1993, she founded Perspectives Ensemble at Columbia University to culturally contextualize the works of composers and in 2013 was awarded the Catalan government's Ramon Llull Prize for Creative Arts for her work on Xavier Montsalvatge. Additionally, she has been researching and writing about the life of her grandfather, David Ohannessian (1884-1953), who founded the Armenian ceramics tradition in Jerusalem in 1919.
	Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.
	Seçil Yılmaz received her PhD degree in History from the Graduate Center, CUNY with her dissertation entitled “Love in the Time of Syphilis: Medicine and Sex in the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1922.” She is currently a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Society for the Humanities and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.

CREDITS

Episode No. 253
Release Date: 31 July 2016
Recording Location: Manhattan, NY
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Images and bibliography courtesy of Sato Moughalian
Music courtesy of Sato Moughalian

TRACK LIST

from Oror / Lullaby by Sato Moughalian & Alyssa Reit
Find it on CD Baby | iTunes

Tamzara
Shushiki (Komitas)
Gurung (Komitas)
Keler Tsoler (Komitas)
Miyan Kez (Grigor Mirzoyan Suni)
Arants Kez Inch Ganim (Sayat-Nova)

from performances of Sato Moughalian, Jacqueline Kerrod, and John Hadfield

Kamancha (Sayat-Nova), arrangement by Alyssa Reit
Makam, arrangement by John Hadfield

IMAGES

Sato Moughalian with pieces attributed to David Ohannessian, March 2016, Photo by Chris Gratien

“Turkish Room,” Sledmere House, home of the Sykes family. Tiles by David Ohannessian c1913. Photo by Sato Moughalian, 2007.

Leighton House, London (site of the "Arab Hall," 15th-16th c. Damascus tiles and additional tiles made by William De Morgan 1877-81, Source: https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/museums/leightonhousemuseum/aboutthehouse.aspx

David Ohannessian Tile Panel at Jerusalem House of Quality (formerly St. John's Ophthalmic Hospital, Jerusalem). Circa 1925.

Façade of the Dome of the Rock (detail, c. 1934-39), prior to the full 1966 restoration; American Colony Photo Dept., Matson Photo Collection, Library of Congress

Girls decorating ceramics at the Dome of the Rock Tiles workshop (1920). American Colony Photo from the Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division.

The Dome of the Rock on the Haram al-Sharif, Jerusalem. The current gilded dome was a 1992 gift from King Hussein of Jordan. Photo by Sato Moughalian, July, 2013.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
courtesy of Sato Moughalian

David Ohannessian (1884-1953)

ALBOYADJIAN, Arshak. Memorial Volume of Armenians in Kutahya (in Armenian). Beirut: Donikian Press, 1961.

ASHBEE, Charles Robert., Ed. Jerusalem, 1918-1920, Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the period of the British Military Administration. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, W., 1921.

ATASOY, Nurhan, Julian Raby, and Yanni Petsopoulos. Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey. London: Alexandria Press in association with Laurence King, 1994.

AULD, S., R. Hillenbrand, & Y.S. Natshah. Ottoman Jerusalem: The living city: 1517 - 1917. London: Altajir World of Islam Trust., 2000.

CARSWELL, John. Iznik Pottery. London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Press, 1998.

CARSWELL, John, and C. J. F. Dowsett. Kütahya Tiles and Pottery from the Armenian Cathedral of St. James, Jerusalem, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

ÇİNİ, Rifat. Kütahya in Turkish Tilemaking. Translated by Solmaz Turunc and Aydin Turunc. Istanbul: Uycan Yayinlari A. S., 1991.

DER MATOSSIAN, Bedross. “The Armenians of Palestine 1918–48,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 41 No. 1, Autumn 2011: 24-44 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/121

HOFFMAN, Adina. Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

KENAAN-KEDAR, Nurith. The Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem: Three Generations, 1919-2003. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2003.

KOUYMJIAN, Dickran. “Armenian Potters of Kutahia,” Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Armenian Communities of Asia Minor. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2014.

KUPFERSCHMIDT, Uri. The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam under the British Mandate for Palestine. Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1987.

KÜRKMAN, Garo. Magic of Clay and Fire. Istanbul: Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation, 2006.
MONK, Daniel Bertrand. An Aesthetic Occupation. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

MOUGHALIAN, Sato. “David Ohannessian and the Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem,” Patrick Donabédian, Dickran Kouymjian, Claude Mutafian, eds., A la découverte de la Jérusalem des Arméniens. Somogy Éditions d’Art, Paris (forthcoming, 2017).

MOUGHALIAN, Sato. "From Kutahya to Al-Quds: The Birth of the Armenian Ceramics Trade in Jerusalem," Stambouline (December 8, 2015).
http://www.stambouline.com/2015/12/from-kutahya-to-al-quds.html.

MOUGHALIAN, Sato. “Kütahya’dan kudüs’e KUDÜS’TE ERMENİ SERAMİK TİCARETİNİN DOĞUŞU, Toplumsal Tarih. (January 2016): 50-57

NECİPOĞLU Gülrü. "From International Timurid to Ottoman: A Change of Taste in Sixteenth-Century Ceramic Tiles." Muqarnas. 7 (1990): 136-170.

OLENIK, Yael. The Armenian Pottery of Jerusalem [Exhibition Catalogue, Ceramics Pavilion, Haaretz Museum, Tel Aviv, Summer 1986]. Tel Aviv: Haaretz Museum, 1986.

RICHMOND, Ernest Tatum. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.

SYKES, Mark. The Caliphs' Last Heritage; A Short History of the Turkish Empire. London: Macmillan and Co, 1915.

YAVUZ, Yıldırım. “The Restoration Project of the Masjid Al-Aqsa by Mimar Kemalettin (1922-26),” Muqarnas. 13 (1996): 149-64.

Komitas Vartabed – Two Psycho-biographies

KARAKASHIAN, Meliné. Komitas (1869 - 1935): Victim of the Great Crime. 2014.

KUYUMJIAN, Rita Soulahian. Archeology of Madness: Komitas, Portrait of an Armenian Icon. Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2001.

Sayat-Nova

DOWSETT, C. J. F. Sayat'- Nova: An 18th-Century Troubadour: a Biographical and Literary Study. Lovanii: Aedibus Peeters, 1996.

JARAHZADEH, Kamyar. “The Bard of the Caucasus: Armenian, Azeri, and Georgian Legacies of Sayat-Nova,” Ajam Media Collective (June 28, 2016). http://ajammc.com/2016/06/28/bard-of-the-caucasus-sayat-nova/

with Boris Adjemian

hosted by Matthew Ghazarian and Susanna Ferguson

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Since its foundation in 1928 by Boghos Nubar, son of Egyptian Prime Minister and Ottoman dignitary Nubar Pasha, the Nubarian library in Paris has served as a major resource for Armenian intellectual life and historical research in the diaspora. What is less well-known is how the library's rich holdings in Ottoman Turkish, Armeno-Turkish, French and English as well as in Armenian might be useful for historians of the larger Ottoman world. In this episode, we talk with library director Boris Ajemian about the extensive archival, photographic, and periodical collections available at the Nubarian library, new directions and possibilities for Armenian and Ottoman social and cultural history, and the library's own fascinating past.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Dr. Boris Adjemian is the Director of the Nubarian Library and author of La fanfare du Négus: Les Arméniens en Éthiopie. (Photo credit: Vazken Khatchig Davidian)
	Matthew Ghazarian is a Ph.D. student in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, African Studies. His research focuses on the intersections of sectarianism, humanitarianism, and political economy in central and eastern Anatolia between 1856 and 1893.
	Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939."

CREDITS

Episode No. 254
Release Date: 2 August 2016
Recording Location: Nubarian Library, Paris
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Special thanks to Sato Moughalian for use of "Chinar Es" and "Habrban" (Find on CD Baby | iTunes)
Images and bibliography courtesy of Boris Adjemian

IMAGES

Coloured sketches of Çırağan Palace by Serkis Balyan (Source: AGBU Nubar Library, Paris)

Sopon Bezirdjian, “Persian Style” from L’Albert. Album des beaux-Arts contenant des dessins en style pur oriental pour la décoration et l’industrie, par Sopon Bézirdjian, artiste-dessinateur, Paris, 1900 (Source: AGBU Nubar Library, Paris)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adjemian, Boris. La fanfare du négus: Les Arméniens en Éthiopie (XIXe-XXe siècles). Paris: Éditions de l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2013.

Adjemian, Boris et Raymond Kévorkian, "Témoignages de rescapés et connaissance du génocide de 1915-1916. La constitution des fonds d’archives arméniens et leurs usages historiographiques," Études arméniennes contemporaines, 5, June 2015: 79-111.

Cankara, Murat. “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet.” Middle Eastern Studies 51, no. 1 (2015): 1-16.

Davidian, Vazken Khatchig, ed. “Towards Inclusive Art Histories: Ottoman Armenian Voices Speak Back.” Études Arméniennes Contemporaines 6. [open access]

Ueno, Masayuki. “One script, two languages: Garabed Panosian and his Armeno-Turkish newspapers in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire.” Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 4 (2016): 605-622.

with Armen T. Marsoobian

hosted by Zoe Griffith

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Interest in Ottoman photography has tended to focus on the orientalist gaze or the view from the imperial center. In this episode, Armen T. Marsoobian offers us the unique lens of the Dildilian family of Armenian photographers in provincial Anatolia. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Dildilians worked to memorialize portraits of fragmenting families and to document everyday scenes in provincial cities such as Sivas, Samsun, and Merzifon. Marsoobian, himself a descendant of the Dildilians, has woven together the family's remarkable photographic archive along with their memoirs and oral histories, to describe how through ingenuity and professional connections, the family and with them much of their art survived the genocide in 1915-16.

This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled "The Visual Past."

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

Armen T. Marsoobian is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University and editor of the journal Metaphilosophy. In addition to his numerous publications in American philosophy, aesthetics, and genocide studies, he is the author of Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia (IB Taurus, 2015), and has organized numerous exhibitions of the Ottoman-era photography of the Dildilian family in Anatolia.

Zoe Griffith is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Brown University. Her work focuses on political economy and governance in Egypt and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Zoe is a co-curator of the Ottoman History Podcast series entitled "Continuity and Transformation in Islamic Law."

CREDITS

Episode No. 255
Release Date: 4 August 2016
Recording Location: Koç RCAC, Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Sato Moughalian for the use of "Al Ayloughs (Komitas)" and "Keler Tsoler (Komitas)" (Find on CD Baby | iTunes)
Images and captions courtesy of Armen Marsoobian

IMAGES
courtesy of Armen T. Marsoobian

Christmas celebration (Apostolic, 6 January 1916) in the midst of the on-going genocide. Banner on the wall reads: Jesus is born, 1916 (Hisous Dzenav, 1916). Members of the Dildilian and Der Haroutiounian families secretly celebrate with four young Armenian men rescued and hidden in the Der Haroutiounian home for almost two years.

Last group portrait of the Dildilian, Der Haroutiounian, and Nakkashian families, Samsun. My mother Alice Marsoobian (née Dildilian) sitting on the floor in the front, late 1922. Photo marked the end of the photographic work of the Dildilians in Ottoman Turkey.

A staged photograph with members of the Dildilian household demonstrating different aspects of textile production in Marsovan, including weaving, carding, spinning, and dyeing in the studio, c. 1910.

Interior of Dildilian Brothers photo studio in Samsun. Governor’s portrait hanging on the left. Camera hidden behind black cloth cover, c. 1920.

“Procession in celebration of the opening of the opening of parliament in Merzifon (Marsovan), 17 Dec. 1908.” Dildilian Brothers postcard.

Death portrait of the sister (unnamed) of the Encababian Brothers Photographers of Sivas (Sebastia), c. 1903. Photo courtesy of Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archive.

Barsamian family, March 31, 1896 in Sivas or Tokat. Sent to the United States as a remembrance of the family that was left behind. Nartuhy and Gabiel Barsamian are pictured with their children. Photo taken 5 months after the Hamidian Massacres of 1895 in the region as a reminder to their survival.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Çelik, Zeynep, Edhem Eldem, and Hande Eagle. Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914. 2015.

Kévorkian, Raymond H. The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Low, David, “Photography and the Empty Landscape: Excavating the Ottoman Armenian Image World,” Études arméniennes contemporaines, no. 6, 2015: 31-69

Marsoobian, Armen. Dildilyan Kardeşler: Anadolu’da Bir Ermeni Ailenin Fotoğrafları ve Öyküsü, 1888-1923. Birzamanlar, 2016.

Marsoobian, Armen. Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia. 2015.

Nassar, Issam, Patricia Almarcegui, and Clark Worswick. Gardens of Sand: Commercial Photography in the Middle East 1859-1905. Turner, 2010.

Özendes, Engin, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1923. Istanbul: YEM Yayın, 2013.

Perez, Nissan. Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839-1885). New York: Abrams, 1988.

Sheehi, Stephen. The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910. 2016.

Suny, Ronald Grigor, "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Tachjian, Vahé. Ottoman Armenians: life, culture, society. 2014.

with Lerna Ekmekçioğlu

hosted by Chris Gratien, Nir Shafir, and Eda Çakmakçı

Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud

After facing the destruction of their community during the First World War, former Ottoman Armenians set about rebuilding in Turkey first during a period of relative optimism under the Allied occupation of Istanbul and later as non-Muslim citizens of new Turkish nation-state. In her new work entitled Recovering Armenia, Lerna Ekmekçioğlu explores the changes and continuities in the identity of Istanbul's Armenian community during this transformative period. In this interview, we explore Armenian collective politics, feminist movements, and expressions of loyalty through the Armenian press and through the writings of women in particular, and we examine the issue of Armenian belonging in Turkey through the lens of "secular dimmitude" among non-Muslim citizens of a predominantly Muslim but secular republic.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is McMillan-Stewart Associated Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works on Armenian and Ottoman/Turkish history, including women’s history.
	Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.
	Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world (1400-1800). He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the History Department at UCLA.
	Eda Çakmakçı is a PhD student in the Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Program at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the politics of nature in Turkey.

CREDITS

Episode No. 256
Release Date: 7 August 2016
Recording Location: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Urakh Ler - Mari Pozapalian; Egil Daglar Ustunden Asam - Viktoriya Hanim; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; Murat Kenarinda - Agyazar Efendi
Images and bibliography courtesy of Lerna Ekmekçioğlu

IMAGES

Cover of Nor Huys, 26 October 1935 (Courtesy of Lerna Ekmekçioğlu)

Portrait of Hayganuş Mark by Ara Güler (Courtesy of Lerna Ekmekçioğlu)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Recovering Armenia
Lerna Ekmekçioğlu
Stanford University Press, 2015

Al-Rustom, Hakem. “Rethinking the ‘Post-Ottoman’: Anatolian Armenians as an Ethnographic Perspective.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, edited by Soraya Altoriki, 452–79. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Bilal, Melissa. “Longing for Home at Home: Armenians in Istanbul.” In Diaspora and Memory: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics, edited by Marie-Aude Baronian, Stephan Besser, and Yolande Jansen. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007.

———. “The Lost Lullaby and Other Stories about Being an Armenian in Turkey.” New Perspectives on Turkey 34 (March 2006): 67–92.

Çaylı, Eray. “‘Accidental’ Encounters with the Ottoman Armenians in Contemporary Turkey.” Études Arméniennes Contemporaines, no. 6 (December 30, 2015): 257–70.

Cheterian, Vicken. Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Dixon, Jennifer M. “Defending the Nation? Maintaining Turkey’s Narrative of the Armenian Genocide.” South European Society and Politics 15, no. 3 (2010): 467–85.

Erbal, Ayda. “Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the ‘Apology’ of Turkish Intellectuals.” In Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, edited by Birgit Schwelling. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012.

Göçek, Fatma Müge. Denial of violence: Ottoman past, Turkish present, and collective violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Hacikyan, Agop. My Ethnic Quest : Minorities in Turkey. Gomidas Institute, 2012.

Kasbarian, Sossie. “The Istanbul Armenians: Negotiating Coexistence.” In Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict, edited by Rebecca Bryant. Berghahn Books, 2016.

Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Suciyan, Talin. The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History. I.B. Tauris, 2016.

Watenpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian. “Preserving the Medieval City of Ani: Cultural Heritage between Contest and Reconciliation.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians., 2014, 528–55.

with Michael Ferguson

hosted by Chris Gratien and Saghar Sadeghian

Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | SoundCloud

The Ottoman slave trade, which was part of an increasingly globalized trafficking network of the early modern period, brought millions of people from the surrounding regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Ottoman Empire. While abolition and emancipation movements occurred in various forms throughout the last century of the empire's history, slavery remained in practice until its very end. In recent decades, the ignored history of the Ottoman slave trade has received more attention, but there has been considerably less discussion of how enslaved people brought to the empire contributed to its socioeconomic and cultural transformation and where the descendants of such people can be found today. In this episode, we talk to Michael Ferguson about his research on the African diaspora in modern Turkey, especially around the city of Izmir. We discuss the origins of Izmir's Afro-Turk community, their historical experience during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, and the ways in which the Afro-Turk identity has been transformed and revived in recent years. We also delve into shared aspects of history and culture between diasporic African communities in other parts of the Middle East.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Michael Ferguson is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK. Michael’s research focuses on questions of identity, marginalization, and minorities in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. His current book project examines the relatively unknown social and cultural history of enslaved and emancipated Africans and their descendants in Izmir in the late Ottoman Empire.
	Chris Gratien holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University's Department of History. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region from the 1850s until the 1950s.
	Saghar Sadeghian is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Willamette University. She is a former Henry Hart Rice Family Foundation Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University's MacMillan Center. Her research focuses on the ideas of nationality, constitution, and modern institutions in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is specifically interested in minority groups in the Middle East and the question of gender, race, religion and ethnicity.

CREDITS

Episode No. 257
Release Date: 10 August 2016
Recording Location: Yale University
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Istanbul'dan Ayva Gelir Nar Gelir - Azize Tozem and Sari Recep; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; Esmeray - 13.5 (digitized vinyl)
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the intro music
Bibliography courtesy of Michael Ferguson

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Çakmak, Ezgi. “Siyah= Yabanci = Göçmen: Afrikali Göçmenlerin İstanbul Deneyimine DairBir Okuma” in Lülüfer Körükmez and İlkay Südaş, eds., Göçler Ülkesi İstanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları, 2015: 169-178.

Erdem, Y. Hakan. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800-1909. New York:St. Martin's Press, 1996

Ferguson, Michael. “Abolitionism and the African Slave Trade in the Ottoman Empire (1857-1922)” in Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., Human Rights in Afro-Eurasia from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Vol.1, The Longue Durée ofBondage in Afro-Eurasia, 1600-1900. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. [forthcoming, Fall 2016]

Ferguson, Michael, and Ehud Toledano, “Slavery and Emancipation in the late Ottoman Empire” in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engermen, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [forthcoming, Fall 2016]

Ferguson, Michael. “White Turks, Black Turks, and Negroes: the Politics of Polarization” inUmut Özkırımlı and Spyros Sofos, eds., Occupy Gezi: The Making of a Protest Movement. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014: 77-88.

Ferguson, Michael. “Clientship, Social Indebtedness and State-Controlled Emancipation of Africans in the Late Ottoman Empire” in Gwyn Campbell and Alessandro Stanziani, eds., Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, London: Pickeringand Chatto, 2013: 49-62.

Ferguson, Michael. “Enslaved and Emancipated Africans on Crete,” in Terence Walz andKenneth M. Cuno, eds., Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010:171-95.

Karamürsel, Ceyda, “Ottoman slavery as a tool for historical analysis: A review of recent literature” New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 50 (2014): 193-203.

Toledano, Ehud R., As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Zilfi, Madeline C., Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

with Alexis Wick

hosted by Susanna Ferguson

Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud

The body of water now known as the Red Sea lay well within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire's well-protected domains for nearly four centuries. It wasn't until the 19th century, however, that this body of water began to be called or conceived of as "the Red Sea" by either Ottomans or Europeans. In this episode, Professor Alexis Wick argues that we have much to learn about how history (and Ottoman history in particular) "makes its object" by studying not only the emergence of the concept of the Red Sea, Ottoman or otherwise, but also the surprising absence of such a history in previous scholarship. His new book The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space (University of California Press, 2016) is both a conceptual history of the Red Sea as seen through both Ottoman and European eyes, and a reflection on the methodologies, tropes, and preoccupations of Ottoman history writ large.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

Alexis Wick is is Assistant Professor of history at the American University of Beirut. His first book, The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), presents an innovative account of the Ottoman Red Sea world even as it traces the genealogy of the concept of the sea. His current research explores the history of coffee, the poetics and practices of space in the Islamic tradition, and the introduction of a new concept of humanity in 19th century Ottoman and Arabic discourse. He is also writing a collection of essays on the various embodiments of the idea of Palestine in different times and places.

Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939."

CREDITS

Episode No. 258
Release Date: 16 August 2016
Recording Location: American University, Beirut
Audio Editing by Onur Engin
Sound excerpts: Müzeyyen Senar - Gülsen-i Hüsnüne Kimler Varıyor
Images and bibliography courtesy of Alexis Wick

IMAGES

Source: Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, A-DVN-MSR-MHM.d, no. 9

Ottoman Map of the Red Sea
Source: Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, HRT 0717
Click here for the full size, high resolution composite image of this map

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexis Wick
The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space
UC Press, 2016

Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Blumi, Isa. Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Brummett, Palmira. Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994.

Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study in Mediterranean History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000.

------. “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology.’” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 722–40.

Lewis, Martin, and Kären Wigen. “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies.” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 161–68.

———. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Lewis, Martin. “Dividing the Ocean Sea.” Geographic Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 188–214.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Wick, Alexis. The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016.

Wigen, Kären. “Oceans of History: Introduction.” AHR Forum. American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 717–21.

with Marc Aymes

hosted by Susanna Ferguson

Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud

In this episode, we talk with Marc Aymes about his approach to Ottoman provincial history through the history of 19th century Cyprus. What is the difference between an Ottoman "provincial history" and "a history of the Ottoman provinces?" Can a "provincial" approach to Ottoman history change the way we understand major questions in Ottoman historiography, including the impact of 19th century reforms (Tanzimat), the role of Europe and Europeans in Ottoman society, and the relationship between Istanbul and other parts of the Sultan's well-protected domains? How might research on Ottoman Cyprus enable us to rethink not only established hypotheses about Ottoman governance, social life, and political transformation in the 19th century, but also our very modes of doing and understanding history itself?

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

Marc Aymes is a Permanent Research Fellow at CNRS (France) affiliated with the Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques. Over the past few years, he conducted research and teaching in Cyprus, Greece, France, Germany, Turkey and the US, with a focus on Mediterranean provincials and forging Ottomans. Recent publications include A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century and Order and Compromise: Government Practices in Turkey from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century (co-edited with Benjamin Gourisse and Élise Massicard).

CREDITS

Episode No. 259
Release Date: 18 August 2016
Recording Location: Paris, France
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; Istanbul'dan Ayva Gelir Nar Gelir - Azize Tozem and Sari Recep
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for allowing us to use the composition "Istanbul" in the outro music
Bibliography courtesy of Marc Aymes

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anastasopoulos, A. (2005) (ed.), Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire [Proceedings of the Halcyon Days V, Rethymno, 10-12 January 2003], Rethymno, Crete University Press.

Barbir, K. (1980) Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708-1758, Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Canbakal, H. (2007) Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: ‘Ayntāb in the 17th Century. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Corbin, A. (1992) ‘Paris-province’, in P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, vol II: Les France, t.1: Conflits et partages, Paris: NRF-Gallimard.

Doumani, B. (1995) Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Forsén, B. and G. Salmeri (2008) (eds) The Province Strikes Back: imperial dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean [Proceedings of the conference ‘Experience of Empires: Responses from the Provinces’, Athens, June 2006], Helsinki: Suomen Ateenan-Instituutin säätiö.

Hadjikyriacou, A. (2011) ‘Society and Economy on an Ottoman Island: Cyprus in the Eighteenth Century’, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, unpubl. Ph.D. thesis.

Hanssen, J, T. Philipp and S. Weber (2002) (eds), The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, Beyrouth: Ergon Verlag Würzburg in Kommission.

Kıbrıs Mutasarrıflığı Evrak ve Defter Kataloğu (1996) [Catalogue of documents and registers from the Cyprus governorate] Istanbul: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı, unpubl. brochure available in the reading rooms of the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul.

Levi, G. (1988) Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Michael, M., M. Kappler and E. Gavriel (2009) (eds) Ottoman Cyprus: A Collection of Studies on History and Culture, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Neumann, C. (1998) ‘Selanik’te onsekizinci yüzyılın sonunda Masârif-i Vilâyet Defterleri: merkezî hükümet, taşra idaresi ve şehir yönetimi üçgeninde mâlî işlemler’ [Late 18th-century registers of provincial expenditure in Salonica: financial procedures between central government, provincial administration and municipal authorities], Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi, 16: 69-97.

Reinkowski, M. (2005) Die Dinge der Ordnung. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung über die osmanischen Tanzimat, Münich: Oldenbourg.

with Philipp Wirtz

hosted by Taylan Güngör and Michael Talbot

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Ottoman-German relations have usually been studied in the context of great-power politics, imperialism both hard and soft, or the military and economic spheres. In this podcast Philipp Wirtz presents some initial findings of a larger research project focusing on personal networks and experiences of Germans residing in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic and two German expatriates in particular: the journalist Friedrich Schrader and the academic Martin Hartmann. As theatre-goers, buyers of books and writers of literary reviews, both took an active part in the cultural life of the Ottoman capital in the years following the Young Turk Revolution. Using their local knowledge and fluency in Ottoman Turkish, both were able to gain unique insights at odds with the popular portrayal of Ottoman affairs in the western media. On the other hand, neither of these authors was immune to the biases of their times, constantly questioning the extent to which Ottoman literary expression, and in particular the emerging “Turkish national literature” were “original” or “civilised.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Philipp Wirtz studied the history, languages and cultures of Europe and the Middle East in Frankfurt am Main, Bamberg and London, with research trips taking him to Iran and Turkey in between. He received his PhD from SOAS, University of London, in 2013 for a dissertation that analysed the ways in which the 'lost world' of the Ottoman Empire was presented in Turkish autobiographies of the 20th century. He currently is a Teaching Fellow in Middle East History at the Department of History, University of Warwick, and Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS
	Taylan Güngör is a doctoral candidate at SOAS in London. His interests are in Medieval and Pre-Modern Eastern Mediterranean trading circles and his research is on trade in Istanbul after 1453.
	Michael Talbot received his PhD from SOAS in 2013 for a thesis on Ottoman-British relations in the eighteenth century, and now lectures and researches on a range of topics in Ottoman history at the University of Greenwich in London.

CREDITS

Episode No. 260
Release Date: 22 August 2016
Recording Location: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Audio Editing by Taylan Güngör

Recorded at SOAS Radio studios. SOAS Radio is an outlet for creative media and talent housed by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Run by alumni, current students and staff at the School, including volunteers from like-minded communities, SOAS Radio is dedicated to varied and original programming on world music, culture and current affairs.

Sound excerpt: Ben Yemenimi Al Isterim - Hafiz Burhan
Bibliography courtesy of Philipp Wirtz

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Necmettin Alkan: Die deutsche Weltpolitik und die Konkurrenz der Mächte um das osmanische Erbe. Die deutsch-osmanischen Beziehungen in der deutschen Presse, 1890-1909. Münster 2002.

Peter Christensen: Architecture, Expertise, and the German Construction of the Ottoman Railway Network, PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2014.

Irmgard Farah: Die deutsche Presse und Propagandatätigkeit im Osmanischen Reich von 1908-1918. Beirut 1993.

Martin Hartmann: Unpolitische Briefe aus der Türkei. Der islamische Orient: Berichte und Forschungen, vol. 3, Berlin 1910

Wilhelm van Kampen: Studien zur deutschen Türkeipolitik in der Zeit Wilhelms II. PhD dissertation, University of Kiel 1968.

Martin Kramer: „Arabistik and Arabism –the passions of Martin Hartmann“. Middle Eastern Studies 25 iii (1989), pp. 283-300.

Sabine Mangold: Eine „weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft“ –die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart 2004.

Suzanne L. Marchand: German orientalism in the age of empire: Religion, race and scholarship. Cambridge 2009.

Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s bid for world power. London 2010.

Ilber Ortaylı: İkinci Abdülhamid Döneminde Osmanlı İmperatorluğunda Alman Nüfuzu. Ankara 1981.

Friedrich Schrader: Konstantinopel in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Berlin 1917.

Philipp Wirtz: Zwischen Revolution und Verfassungsstaat: Die jungtürkische Bewegung und osmanische Innenpolitik in deutschen Zeitungsberichten, 1908-1910. Saarbrücken 2010.

Ursula Wokoceck: German Orientalism: The study of the Middle East and Islam form 1800 to 1945. London and New York 2009.

Osmanischer Lloyd/ Lloyd Ottomane, Istanbul November 1908 to October 1918. Complete set held by the German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul, partial set held by the Staatsbibliothek Berlin

Left to right: Michael Talbot, Philipp Wirtz, and Taylan Güngör at SOAS Radio in London

with Melih Levi

hosted by Zoe Griffith

Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | SoundCloud

Emerging as a literary genre towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman novel has been overshadowed by the transformation of the Turkish language and alphabet after 1928. In this episode, we speak with Melih Levi about his recent English translation with Monica Ringer of one the first examples of the Ottoman novel, Ahmed Midhat Efendi's Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi (Syracuse University Press, 2016). Far from a derivative imitation of European literary themes and forms, Ahmed Midhat's novel revolves both seriously and playfully around the concepts of ala franga and ala turca, cajoling and instructing its readers on how live as authentically "modern" Ottomans in a rapidly modernizing empire. Published in 1875, the novel opens windows onto the Ottoman family, slavery, masculinity, and social orders, as well as literal and psychological relations with Europe in nineteenth-century Istanbul.

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PARTICIPANT BIOS

	Melih Levi received his BA in English Literature from Amherst College and will be starting his PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford in the Fall. His work focuses on divergent modernisms, transcultural poetics and prosody.
	Zoe Griffith is a doctoral candidate in History at Brown University working on political economy and governance in Egypt and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Zoe is a co-curator of the OHP series on legal history in the Ottoman Empire and Islamic world.

CREDITS

Episode No. 261
Release Date: 23 August 2016
Recording Location: ANAMED, Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Sound excerpts: Katibim (Uskudar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla; Egil Daglar Ustunden Asam - Viktoriya Hanim; Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Bibliography courtesy of Melih Levi

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi
Translated by Melih Levi and Monica M. Ringer
Syracuse University Press, 2016

Ahmet Mithat, Melih Levi, and Monica M. Ringer. Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi: an Ottoman novel. 2016.

Bertram, Carel. Imagining the Turkish House: Collective Visions of Home. Texas: University
of Texas Press, 2008.

Boyar, Ebru, and Kate Fleet, eds. A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Esen, Nüket. Hikâye Anlatan Adam: Ahmet Mithat. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2014.

Esen, Nüket, and Erol Köroğlu, eds. Merhaba Ey Muharrır! Ahmet Mithat Üzerine Eleştirel
Yazılar. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2006.

Esen, Nüket. “The narrator and the narratee in Ahmet Mithat.” Edebiyat: Journal of M.E.
Literatures 13, no. 2 (2003): 139-146.

Esen, Nüket. Modern Türk Edebiyatı Üzerine Okumalar. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2006.

Esen, Nüket. Türk Romanında Aile Kurumu (1870-1970). Ankara: T.C. Başbakanlık Aile
Araştırmaları Kurumu Yayını, 1991.

Evin, Ahmet Ö. Origins and Development of The Turkish Novel. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca
Islamica, 1983.

Finn, Robert. The Early Turkish Novel: 1872-1900. Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1984.

Fortna, Benjamin C. Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish
Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

İnci, Handan. “Felâtun Bey’i Tanır Mısınız?” Kitaplık, May 2005.

Kadıoğlu, Ayşe. “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official
Identity.” Middle Eastern Studies 32, no 2 (April 1996): 177-193.

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Mapping the Medieval World in Islamic Cartography

The Middle Class in the Modern Middle East

Neo-Ottoman Architecture and the Transnational Mosque

Landscapes of the Eastern Question

The German Imperial Fountain in Istanbul

Literacies and the Emergence of Modern Egypt

Marginalized Women in Khedival Egypt

A New History of Print in Ottoman Cairo

Bobovius and the Republic of Letters

Ottoman Commentaries on Islamic Philosophy

Tracing Plague in the Ottoman Empire

The Life and Art of Ceramicist David Ohannessian

Inside the Nubarian Library

Armenian Photography in Ottoman Anatolia

Secular Dhimmis of the Republic

African Diaspora in Ottoman Izmir

The Ottoman Red Sea

Provincial Histories of the Ottoman Empire

German Expatriates in Late Ottoman Istanbul

Translating the Ottoman Novel