Dr. Yaşar Tolga Cora, a professor of History at Boğaziçi University. Tolga Hoca received his PhD from the University of Chicago's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2016. Dr. Cora will present a talk titled "Gaydz: An Example from the Armenian Socialist Press in the Second Constitutional Era" based in part on his recently published article "Sosyal Demokrat Hınçak […]

Ayça Alemdaroğlu, Associate Director of the Program on Turkey and Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Increasing access to higher education is often seen as a threat to authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, authoritarian rulers would limit access to avoid the spread of anti-regime sentiments. Turkey suggests […]

Burak Erdim is an associate professor of architectural history and design at North Carolina State University. He teaches studios and courses on the global history of architecture and urbanism from the mid-19th Century to the present. Landed Internationals provides a refreshing perspective on the aims of mid-century architectural education and examines the operations of housing […]

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes, effectively blurring the lines between pilgrims and migrants, and the legal boundary between Ottomans and foreigners. As the Ottoman Empire sought to promote a […]

YUSUF AL-NABHANI AND CONSERVATIVE MODERNITY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN PERIOD Speakers: Amal Ghazal (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies), Ahmad El Shamsy (University of Chicago), Stephennie Mulder (UT Austin), Finbarr Barry Flood (NYU) Abstract: In recent years the impact that Sunni reform movements had on the nineteenth-century Islamic world has attracted increasing attention. On the one […]

Speakers: Emin Lelić (Salisbury University), Naz Yücel (George Washington University), Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular (Rutgers University, Newark), and discussant Burçak Özlüdil (NJIT) Abstract: This panel will explore key social and political spaces and institutions present throughout the Ottoman Empire. Panelist Emin Lelić (Associate Professor of History at Salisbury University) will center his presentation around the Ottoman household […]

Queer in Translation intervenes in queer studies’ separate, and in fact diagonally opposing approaches to neoliberalism and Islam by using the case of Turkey’s AKP governments for the past 16 years. I theorize “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities that work to deploy marginality onto ever expanding populations […]

A LECTURE BY PROF. LERNA EKMEKCIOGLU The immediate aftermath of the genocide was a time of both misery and hope for Armenians. Emboldened by the Ottoman defeat, Allies’ occupation of the Ottoman capital and their wartime promises for justice, Armenian feminists of Constantinople did not shy away from asking Turkish women to acknowledge the damage […]

Global Uprising: Space & Time II: The Square and the Commune Speakers: Joshua Clover (UC Davis), Dean Saranillio (NYU), Nazan Üstündağ (Independent Scholar) and discussant Lenora Hanson (NYU) Abstract: Our age of uprising has also been the age of the urban insurrection. And yet for all their sublime spectacularity, the insurrections seem to reach their […]

QUEER DIASPORIC VISUAL ART: ISLAMICATE CONTEXTS Speakers: Alireza Shojaian, Laurence Rasti, Sarp Kerem Yavuz Abstract: This panel explores questions of queerness and diaspora through the lens of visual art. CSGS Visiting Scholar Dr. Andrew Gayed will be in conversation with acclaimed contemporary artists Alireza Shojaian, Laurence Rasti, and Sarp Karem Yavuz. Turkish artist Sarp Karem Yavuz […]

In the light of four books that were either written with a view to secure the patronage of the Chief Black Eunuch of the Ottoman court, or to critique him, between the early seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, Dr. Tezcan will discuss Ottoman literary representations of Africans and how these representations intersect with the heavily gendered […]

Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1274), the Sufi shaykh and poet celebrated for his mystical Mathnawi, rose to prominence during a particularly turbulent period as Mongol rule was imposed upon Seljuk Anatolia. While partisan arguments abound in modern Turkish historiography whether he was a collaborator with the Mongol invaders or not, Mawlana’s social and political […]

Our W’OTSAp (What is up in Ottoman and Turkish Studies?) meeting in March features the winner of the 2020 Vangelis Kechriotis Memorial Travel Grant, Kaleb Herman Adney (UCLA). Herman’s dissertation project, Habits of the Market: Commercial Networks, Regional Finance, and Resistance in the Ottoman Tobacco Trade (c. 1858-1912), examines the political economy of tobacco in […]

Turkish Literature in Translation Reading Group: The Stone Building and Other Places by Aslı Erdoğan with translator Dr. Sevinç Türkkan. Meeting via Zoom.

Following the conversation on the content and context of Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient, this panel will discuss the complex production of the book from its early inception through the final translation. Speakers: Prof. Zeynep Çelik Aron Aji Ayşen Gür Rana Alpöz Sibel Doğru Registration Link here. More information here.

A seminar with Professor Jenny White. It is 1975 and Turkey is near civil war. Four medical students struggle on opposing sides in a society torn apart by violent political factions. Each has a different reason for joining the cause, with consequences that follow them into the present. Turkish Kaleidoscope, a graphic novel by Jenny White […]

Unspoken memories, unwritten histories: Eastern Mediterranean pluralism in oral history and memory studies A series of workshops devoted to theory and practice in academia and civil society Less than a hundred years ago, most Eastern Mediterranean cities were marked by a high degree of cultural pluralism. Whereas the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the […]

Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in the Ottoman Mentalities Dr. Marinos Sariyannis (ERC Grant 2017- 2023)

Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography in Turkey, Tanzania, Senegal, Gambia, and Benin, Dr. Guner shows how whiteness, historically associated with Western modernity and state secularism in Turkey, is redefined as the marker of Islamic civility in and through these transnational relations. Analysis of the construction of Muslim whiteness contributes to debates on intersectionality of race […]