E498 | The history of North Africa is usually framed by the period of French colonialism and the era of independent nations that followed. But what happens if we let an object like the 78 rpm record do the work of periodization? In this episode, we talk to Christopher Silver about the unique vantage point that gramophone records offer on the emergence of national culture in the Maghreb during the first half of the 20th century. We will explore the work of artists whose lives straddled Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco as well as the colonial metropoles, and we will highlight the role of North African Jewish singers, musicians, producers, and promoters in the development of the region's music industry.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/03/gharamophone.html

Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA. He is the author of numerous article on history and music in North Africa, including most recently in the International Journal of Middle East Studies.

Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region of the former Ottoman Empire from the 1850s until the 1950s.

CREDITS

Episode No. 498
Release Date: 22 March 2021
Recording Location: Montreal / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production by Chris Gratien
For more music and information about North African recording artists of the gramophone era, visit Christopher Silver's website Gharamophone: https://gharamophone.com/
Images and bibliography courtesy of Christopher Silver available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/03/gharamophone.html

The Maghreb in the Gramophone Era | Christopher Silver

E500 | At the turn of the twentieth century, Ottoman port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were sites of vibrant cultural encounters. While infrastructural innovations at docks and quays reshaped the urban waterfront, the inhabitants of Izmir, Istanbul, and Salonica engaged with new forms of entertainment arriving from Europe. Operas, balls, and beerhouses changed the way people mingled and interpreted coexistence and diversity in their urban environment. Migrants from Europe and from the hinterlands of major port cities created an original form of Ottoman Mediterranean modernity. This cosmopolitan urban culture was alluring and festive but also had its discontents, who denounced it as decadent and servile to European imperialism. Exploring the everyday life of late Ottoman port cities reveals an effervescent lapse of time in which notions such as modernity, Europe, empire, and nation could be experienced in manifold ways, before the major conflicts of the twentieth century gave a fatal blow to Mediterranean urban diversity.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/04/ports.html

Malte Fuhrmann is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin specializing in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey, and Southeast Europe. Besides Port Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean: Urban Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020) he has published numerous articles, edited volumes, and monographs, including Konstantinopel – Istanbul. Stadt der Sultane und Rebellen (Constantinople – Istanbul: City of Sultans and Rebels), Frankfurt (M.): Fischer 2019, and The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, London: Routledge 2011, a volume edited together with Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi, Florian Riedler. Malte is currently working on a comparison of development discourse in modern Bulgaria and Turkey.

Andreas Guidi is Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz, Germany. After his joint Ph.D. at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, he is preparing a monograph tentatively entitled “Youth between Empires: Generations, Fascist Colonialism, and the post-Ottoman Mediterranean in Rhodes”. His post-doc project investigates how smugglers and illegal trade contributed to constructing a transnational modern Mediterranean.

Zeynep Ertuğrul is a PhD student at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She is working on a dissertation project entitled “Preaching the Republic: The Spokespeople of the Single-Party Regime in Turkey.”

CREDITS

Episode No. 500
Release Date: 1 April 2021
Recording Location: Berlin
Audio editing by Zeynep Ertuğrul and Andreas Guidi
Music: Turku - "Bir demet Yasemen"; Maria Papagika - "Ti se melei esenane"
Audio elements: "A quiet seaside seagulls distant", "Waves at the edge of Bosphorus", "Bbc News Sound Effects Tape (Old) - boat - ships sirens", "A night in Athens". Images and bibliography courtesy of Malte Fuhrmann available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/04/ports.html

Ottoman Port Cities of the Modern Mediterranean | Malte Fuhrmann

E501 | In the Hijaz, the Ottoman Empire managed not only Mecca and Medina--the two holiest cities in Islam--but also port cities of the Red Sea with connections to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this episode, Michael Christopher Low explains how the empire managed these dynamics as the hajj transformed thanks to steam travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While European colonial anxieties about the hajj focused on epidemic disease and subversive politics, Ottoman concerns centered on the legal status of the region and its infrastructural networks. While projects such as the Hijaz Railway are often understood as manifestations of Abdulhamid II's commitment to pan-Islam, Low suggests that these measures were more accurately a product of emerging technocratic forms of Ottoman governance. He also discusses continuities with the Saudi state. Low's book is Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/04/low.html

Michael Christopher Low received his PhD in International and Global History from Columbia University in 2015. Low is an Assistant Professor of History at Iowa State University and is currently a Senior Humanities Research Fellow for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020) and co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). His articles have also appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Environment and History; the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Jadaliyya; and the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Low also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Global History and the Journal of Tourism History.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

CREDITS

Episode No. 501
Release Date: 7 April 2021
Recording Location: Abu Dhabi and Somerville, MA
Audio editing by Sam Dolbee  
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street"; Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route"
Bibliography courtesy of Michael Christopher Low available at

Ottoman Mecca and the Indian Ocean Hajj | Michael Christopher Low

E503 | In this first part of a two-part interview, we talk to Marc Baer about how he first became interested in Ottoman history and explore the main themes and the questions underpinning the research in his five books. In this conversation, we place special focus on the books Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe and The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Our discussion centers on approaches to the subject of conversion in the Ottoman Empire and the history of the dönme community born out of the transformations of the 17th century.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/baer1.html

Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include religious conversion, gender and sexuality, and interreligious relations and state violence in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Turkey, and Germany.

Zeinab Azarbadegan is the post-doctoral fellow at the Vienna School of International Studies. She completed her PhD at Columbia University. Her research focuses on imperial knowledge production about the space of Ottoman Iraq by the Ottomans, the Qajars, and the British in the late nineteenth century.

CREDITS

Episode No. 503
Release Date: 18 June 2021
Audio editing by Zeinab Azarbadegan
Music: Special thanks to Monsieur Doumani for permission to use the composition "The System/Το σύστημαν", Isaac Algazi - Avinou Malkenou, Isaac Algazi - Ana Ke Av Zedoni 
Images and bibliography courtesy of Marc Baer available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/baer1.html

Conversion and Jewish Histories of the Ottoman Empire | Marc Baer

E504 | The Ottoman conquests of the 16th century represented a watershed moment in many senses. Our guest Faisal Husain explains the most literal of these senses: the unification of the Tigris and Euphrates basins under a single political authority and its ramifications for the history of Iraq. In our conversation, we explore how Ottoman rule in Iraq created new ecological possibilities and realities, setting the stage for momentous interventions in the rivers detailed in Husain's recent book "Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire." We also reflect on what Iraq reveals about Ottoman history writ large and the empire's dualist historical identity as an agrarian empire on one hand and flexible one on the other, in which accommodating local ecological difference was critical to governance.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/the-environmental-origins-of-ottoman.html

Faisal Husain is Assistant Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Rivers of the Sultan and a member of the editorial boards of Marmara Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi and Global Environment.

Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first monograph entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

CREDITS

Episode No. 504
Release Date: 27 June 2021
Recording Location: Charlottesville, VA / State College, PA
Sound production and compisition by Sam Dolbee
Music: Chad Crouch - Pacing 
Bibliography and images courtesy of Faisal Husain available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/the-environmental-origins-of-ottoman.html

The Environmental Origins of Ottoman Iraq | Faisal Husain

E505 | 19. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında, dinamit gibi patlayıcıların icadı ile küresel düzeyde oluşan küçük silah fazlası Osmanlı Balkanlarındaki devrimcileri hangi bakımlardan güçlendirdi? Osmanlı Devleti, imparatorluk karşıtı eylemleri kolaylaştıran bu ”devrim karaborsası”nı hangi yöntemleri kullanarak kontrol etmeye çalıştı? Bu bölümde, Dr. Ramazan Hakkı Öztan ile geç Osmanlı Balkanlarında devrimcilik, şiddet ve teknoloji ilişkisini, meselenin küresel politik ekonomi boyutunu da dikkate alarak değerlendiriyoruz. Devrimci şiddetin kavramsallaştırılması ve ideolojilerin devrimci siyasetteki önemini eleştirel olarak ele alırken, bu alandaki arşiv kaynaklarının nasıl incelenebileceğini de örneklerle tartışıyoruz.

https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/oztan.html

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan lisans eğitimini Hacettepe Üniversitesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı’nda, yüksek lisansını ise Wyoming Üniversitesi Tarih bölümünde tamamladı. 2016 yılında Utah Üniversitesi Tarih bölümünde Peter Sluglett’ın danışmanlığında tamamladığı doktora tezinde, 19 yüzyıl sonu Osmanlı Balkanlarında ‘milliyetçiliğin metaları’ ve ‘devrimin karaborsası’ olarak kavramsallaştırdığı silah ve dinamit kaçakçılığı üzerine yoğunlaştı. 2017-2020 yılları arasında Neuchâtel Üniversitesi’nde Jordi Tejel’in yürütücüsü olduğu ve Avrupa Birliği Ufuk2020 programı kapsamındaki bir araştırma projesinde, doktora sonrası araştırmacı olarak çalıştı ve Türkiye-Suriye sınır bölgesi üzerine araştırmalar yaptı. Kasım 2020’den beri Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk Enstitüsü’nde Dr. Öğretim Üyesi olarak görev yapmaktadır.

Can Gümüş Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü'ndeki doktora çalışmalarına, geç Osmanlı dönemi kentlerinde halk sağlığı ve kentleşme ilişkisini incelediği araştırmasıyla devam ediyor.

YAPIM VE YAYIN

Bölüm No: 505
Yayınlanma Tarihi: 6 Temmuz 2021
Kayıt yeri: İstanbul
Ses Editörü: Can Gümüş
Müzik: Aitua; A.A. Aalto; Chad Crouch
Görseller ve Kaynakça Ramazan Hakkı Öztan’ın müsaadesiyle

Balkan Komitacıları, Teknoloji ve Şiddet | Ramazan Hakkı Öztan

E506 | Refik Halid Karay (1889-1965) was a writer, bureaucrat, and political exile whose life spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Christine Philliou traces his life as well as a genealogy of political opposition more broadly in her new book Turkey: A Past Against History. Following Refik Halid between his exiles in Sinop, Syria, and elsewehre as well as his momentous encounter with Mustafa Kemal in the Telegraph Episode, Philliou sheds light on the complicated transition between empire and nation. She also grapples with the challenge of telling history based on the voluminous and often satirical musings of a figure himself deeply invested in interpreting the past. 

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/halit.html

Christine Philliou is professor in the History Department, Director of the Modern Greek and Hellenic Studies Program at the Institute for European Studies, and Director of the Turkish and Ottoman Studies Program at the Center for Middle East Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book was Biography of an Empire (2010, UC Press; Greek edition forthcoming 2021 with Alexandria Publications) and her new book is Turkey: A Past Against History (2021, UC Press).

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS 

Episode No. 506
Release Date: 16 July 2021
Recording Location: Kensington, CA / Somerville, MA / New York, NY
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Script by Brittany White and Sam Dolbee
Additional thanks to Chris Gratien
Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route," "Saez," "Big Road of Burravoe"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Christine Philliou available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/halit.html

Refik Halit: A Life of Opposition | Christine Philliou

E507 | In this episode, Fariba Zarinebaf discusses the history of Galata and the early modern Mediterranean more broadly. Beginning with the incorporation of Galata's Genoese community of Istanbul under Ottoman rule in 1453, Zarinebaf explains how the treaties known as the capitulations (ahdname in Turkish) provided a durable framework for commercial exchange and pluralistic everyday life in Ottoman port cities. She also considers how these arrangements compared with commerce and life in non-Ottoman Mediterranean ports. Through a focus on French-Ottoman relations, Zarinebaf offers a glimpse of how treaties become involved in changing economic fortunes in the Mediterranean and the world. She also attends to how these economic patterns shaped the more intimate aspects of social life in Galata, closing with the impact of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt on the French community of Galata.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/zarinebaf.html

Fariba Zarinebaf obtained her PhD in Middle Eastern history from the University of Chicago in 1991. She is a professor of history at the University of California-Riverside and was the former director of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies there. She has taught at Bilkent University, Northwestern University and the University of Virginia. Among her publications are, Les Iraniens d’Istanbul, co-edited with Thierry Zarcone, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century Istanbul (University of California Press, 2010), Mediterranean Encounters, Trade and Pluralism in Galata (University of California Press, 2018) and Fariba Zarinebaf, John Bennet and Jack L. Davis, A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece (American School of Classical Studies, 2005), Women on the Margins: Gender, Charity and Justice in the Early Modern Middle East ( Isis press, 2014). Her next book is tentatively entitled; The Last of the Silk Caravans, Cross-Cultural Trade and Urban Life on the Ottoman-Safavid Silk Road in the Early Modern Period.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Nir Shafir researches the intellectual and religious history of the Middle East, from roughly 1400-1800, focusing on material culture and the history of science and technology. He is an assistant professor of history at UCSD.

CREDITS

Episode No. 507
Release Date: 23 July 2021
Recording Location: Chicago, IL / Somerville, MA / Torino
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Additional thanks to Chris Gratien
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street,"; Zé Trigueiros, "Saez" 
Images and bibliography courtesy of Fariba Zarinebaf available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/zarinebaf.html

Galata and the Early Modern Mediterranean World | Fariba Zarinebaf

E508 | The modern history of Beirut has been defined by periods of intense construction, destruction, and reconstruction. In this episode, we explore the layers of history in Beirut's cityscape through a walking tour with Rayya Haddad. We chart Beirut's transformation from its rise as a late Ottoman capital through the expansion of the port during the French Mandate period, its golden age as a commercial center in independent Lebanon during the 1950s and 60s, the long civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, and the postwar reconstruction carried out by the company Solidere. We also explore the history of Beit Beirut, a unqiue building designed by Youssef Aftimus--Beirut's foremost architect of the late Ottoman and French Mandate period--from its Mediterranean revivalist origins to its redesign as a sniper's haven during the war, ending with its rescue and renovation by activists in recent decades. We conclude with some thoughts on what this layered history of the city means for the new layer of destruction and reconstruction created by the explosion in the port during August 2020.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/beirut.html

Now based in the U.S., Rayya Haddad carries her camera, and her passion for dance, percussion, Mother Nature and food with her wherever she goes. She has created interventions, performances, photographic projects and installations that illuminate alternative possibilities to the limitations and restrictions placed on so many based on race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration or social status, gender and sexual identity, and more. With commercial photography her work is primarily focused on the following 3 subjects; product ranging from jewelry to the culinary arts; music, dance, theatre and performance art, and family portraiture. She received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago after her studies of sociology in New Orleans, Louisiana.

CREDITS

Episode No. 508
Release Date: 29 July 2021
Recording Location: Beirut
Music and sound elements (by order of appearance): Nasri Shamseddine - Samhina; BBC - بيروت مدينة منكوبة; Karawan - Ya Ganna; This Week - The Agony of Lebanon; Azar Habib - Ya Rayeh; Eudet Kaado - Mowasheh El Rabiy; Soapkills - Aranis; Prof. Elia Baida - Yalli Hajarti Habayeb; Soft and Furious - So What?
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Additional thanks to Sam Dolbee

Layers of History in Downtown Beirut | Rayya Haddad

E509 | The waqf, often translated as "endowment," is a critical player in the story of urban landscapes, charitable giving, property management, and religion in the Islamic world. But what is a waqf? In this episode, Nada Moumtaz uncovers the many lives of waqf in the city of Beirut, from Ottoman times until the present. We talk about waqfs as buildings, processes, acts, and investments. We see how the story of waqf illuminates central features of the modern state while blurring boundaries between family life and public life, religion and business, charity and investment, past and future, and human and divine.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/moumtaz.html

Nada Moumtaz is Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her book, God's Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State will be published by University of California Press in August 2021.

Susanna Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Smith College. She writes and teaches on the history of gender, sexuality, and political thought in the modern Arab world.

CREDITS

Episode No. 509
Release Date: 6 August 2021
Recording Location: Northampton, MA / Beirut, Lebanon
Sound production and composition by Susanna Ferguson
Music: "Fifteen Street," Blue Dot Sessions
Bibliography and images courtesy of Nada Moumtaz at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/moumtaz.html

The Many Lives of Waqf in Beirut | Nada Moumtaz

E510 | Depictions of the Middle East as a space of timeless violence pervade modern media, popular culture, and scholarship. In The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East, Laura Robson offers a rejoinder to such misconceptions while also providing a historical explanation of these distinctly modern forms of violence in greater Syria and Iraq, also known as the Mashriq. In this episode, we discuss how a new kind of territoriality in the late nineteenth century combined with imperialist interventions to transform violence into a way of making political claims through the twentieth century and up to the present across the region. We additionally talk about historical research and writing more generally, and how Robson’s past as a trained pianist has shaped her work.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/robson.html

Laura Robson is the Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State University. She has written or edited five books, most recently The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (Oxford, 2020), a history of the relationship between violence and the state in the twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean, and Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov; Stanford, 2019), a comparative examination of the political “solution” of ethnic partition in the decolonizing world. Her current research considers the twentieth century rise of schemes for mass refugee removal and resettlement, in the Middle East and beyond.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the infrastructural politics of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic.

CREDITS

Episode No. 510
Release Date: 13 August 2021
Recording Location: State College, PA / Somerville, MA / Berlin
Sound production by Sam Dolbee and Chris Gratien
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street," Zé Trigueiros, "Saez" 
Bibliography courtesy of Laura Robson at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/robson.html

The Politics of Mass Violence | Laura Robson

E511 | Among the most murky periods of the Ottoman dynasty's six-century history is the period of its very emergence in medieval Anatolia. In this episode, we talk to Rudi Lindner about his attempts to understand this early period of Ottoman history and the development of hypotheses and methods concerning the investigation of Ottoman origins over the past century of scholarship. We also reflect on what decades of research and teaching has taught Lindner about sources for history and the questions they require us to ask.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/rudi.html

Rudi Lindner is Professor Emeritus of History and Astronomy at the University of Michigan, and the author of the books, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, published by Indiana University Press in 1983, and Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2007.

Joshua M. White is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2017).

Maryam Patton is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program. She is interested in early modern cultural exchanges, and her dissertation studies cultures of time and temporal consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

CREDITS

Episode No. 511
Release Date: 20 August 2021
Recording Location: Charlottesville, VA / Ann Arbor, MI / Oxford, UK
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D.960 (Schubert, Franz) performed by Randolph Hokanson
Bibliography courtesy of Rudi Lindner and Joshua White available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/rudi.html

The Origins of Ottoman History | Rudi Lindner

E512 | For years, the historiography of the 14th-century Black Death produced more questions than answers. Then, roughly a decade ago, genomic research confirmed that the medieval Black Death was caused by the same bacteria, yersinia pestis, which causes the modern bubonic plague. This settled the burning question of precisely which disease had caused the pandemic that produced colossal mortality in many parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. In this episode, we speak to Monica H. Green, whose recent work has raised new questions about the Black Death by showing that the chronology of the Black Death was incomplete. As she explains, prior outbreaks of plague in 13th-century Asia occurred at the edges of the ascendant Mongol Empire, roughly a century before the plague arrived in Western Europe. In our conversation, we learn how Green uncovered the new story of the "four Black Deaths" and in doing so, explore the historiography of the Black Death and how genetics, archaeology, and a fresh approach to textual sources have brought us to a deeper understand of one of history's deadliest pandemics.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/green.html

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine specializing on medieval medical history and global health. The author or editor of four books and numerous articles, Green works on the social and intellectual history of medicine of Europe while also pursuing new work that brings scientific findings on the histories of infectious diseases into dialogue with traditional historical sources. She is currently working on a book, The Black Death: A Global History, which proposes a redefined conception of the geography and the chronology of the late medieval plague pandemic known as the Black Death. A second book-in-progress focuses on the impact of the medical translations (Arabic-into-Latin) of the 11th-century merchant-turned-monk, Constantinus Africanus. Together with Nükhet Varlık and Tunahan Durmaz, she is engaged on a project, initially funded by the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, to make more sources on the history of plague in the Islamicate world available in English translation.

Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first monograph entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

CREDITS

Episode No. 512
Release Date: 26 August 2021
Recording Location: Phoenix, AZ / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: via Free Music Archive - A.A. Aalto, Chad Crouch, Aitua
Bibliography courtesy of Monica Green available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/08/green.html

Rewriting the Black Death | Monica Green

E513 | Over the course its final decades, millions of Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees of war and Russian conquest, settled in the Ottoman Empire. Between a quarter and a third of people in Turkey today have ancestors who arrived with those migrations. Yet their history often stops short of capturing the personal experiences of such people, what was erased, and what they have sought to preserve. In this episode, we speak with sociologist Şölen Şanlı Vasquez about how to write a more empathetic history of migration in Turkey through the lens of the Circassian diaspora. For her, this history is not just the story of how people from the North Caucasus were expelled from one empire and settled in an another. It is also a personal story about continuity, rupture, and recovery within the families of immigrants across generations and continents. Through a conversation about her ongoing research project called "The Home Within," we explore the themes of family, gender, ethnicity, race, and erasure --- not only in Turkey --- but across contexts of migration and displacement in the US and elsewhere. And we also reflect on the importance of public history that makes these issues relevant and relatable to a wider audience.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/09/circassian.html

Şölen Şanlı Vasquez teaches sociology at the Santa Rosa Junior College. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in 2009 and her M.Sc. in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics in 2000. Her book "Women and Cultural Citizenship in Turkey: Mass Media and 'Woman's Voice' Television" has been published by I.B. Tauris in 2016. Her most recent research project, The Home Within, is a digital history project about the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS

Episode No. 513
Release Date: 16 September 2021
Recording Location: San Francisco, CA / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production and transcript by Chris Gratien
Additional thanks to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Christine Philliou, and Sam Dolbee
Music: Chad Crouch
Bibliography and images courtesy of Şölen Şanlı Vasquez available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/09/circassian.html

Season 11

The Circassian Diaspora | Şölen Şanlı Vasquez

E514 | Osman of Timișoara was a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire born during the late 17th century in modern-day Romania. As a young man serving in the Ottoman military, he was captured by the Habsburg army. He would spend more than a decade as a captive in Austria. Many people of his time had similar stories. What made Osman special was that he left behind a rare autobiographical account of his experiences and exploits. In our conversation with Giancarlo Casale about his translation of Osman’s memoir entitled Prisoner of the Infidels, we’ll explore the similarities among experiences of enslavement in the Ottoman and Habsburg lands and learn how Osman positioned himself as a linguistic and later diplomatic go-between. And through the life of Osman, his account of his own efforts to return to the Ottoman Empire, and the momentous events he witnessed, we will reflect on his autobiography as a work of literature and the messages contained within it.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/11/casale.html

Giancarlo Casale is Professor of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, as well as a permanent member of the history faculty at the University of Minnesota.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS

Episode No. 514
Release Date: 18 November 2021
Recording Location: Minneapolis, MN / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production by Chris Gratien
Music: Aitua; A.A. Aalto; Chad Crouch
Bibliography courtesy of Giancarlo Casale available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/11/casale.html

Osman of Timisoara: Prisoner of the Infidels | Giancarlo Casale

E515 | The 1948 War resulted in the creation of the state of Israel and the Nakba of 750,000 Palestinian refugees. In Dear Palestine, Shay Hazkani sheds new light on these events through a unique source base: hundreds of personal letters secretly copied by an Israeli censorship apparatus. We talk in this episode both about his struggle to access these materials and the subversive truths that they reveal, including everything from Moroccan Jewish volunteers who felt solidarity with Arabs to Palestinian refugees who attempted to care for and return to their homes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/11/hazkani.html

Shay Hazkani is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a particular interest in the social and cultural history of Palestine/Israel, and Middle Eastern Jews. He teaches at the University of Maryland in the Departments of History and Jewish Studies. Hazkani earned his PhD in History and Judaic studies in 2016 from New York University, his Master’s from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University ,and his BA in Middle Eastern Studies from Tel Aviv University. His work has been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Israel Studies Review, and he also publishes historical pieces in the Israel-daily Haaretz. His book Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War was published in 2021 by Stanford University Press.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

CREDITS

Episode No. 515
Release Date: 29 November 2021
Recording Location: Somerville, MA
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Music: Chad Crouch, "Pacing"; Zé Trigueiros, "Sombra," "Chiaroscuro," "Big Road of Burravoe"
Bibliography courtesy of Shay Hazkani available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/11/hazkani.html

Dear Palestine | Shay Hazkani

E456 | What did science look like in early modern Istanbul? In this episode, Harun Küçük discusses his new book, <i>Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732 </i>(University of Pittsburgh Press), which tackles this question in a bold fashion. Tracing the impact of late seventeenth and early eighteenth transformations of the Ottoman economy, Küçük argues that the material conditions of scholars greatly deteriorated in this period. The changes did not, however, stop people from wanting to know about the world, but rather reoriented their work toward more practical applications of science. Küçük contrasts these conditions with those in some parts of northwestern Europe, where a more leisurely version of science--often theoretically inclined--emerged. He also grapples with the parallels between educational institutions in the early modern period and today.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/03/science-ottoman-empire.html

Harun Küçük is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has previously published on Ottoman translations of scientific texts, science and religion, and the interaction between science, technology and statecraft in the early eighteenth century. His recent book, Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732, takes a look at the relationship between the material conditions of scholarship and the content of science in the Ottoman capital. He is currently engaged in two collaborative projects on early modern Ottoman history and is writing a book-length essay on the relationship between time and scientific labor.

Sam Dolbee is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He completed his PhD at New York University in 2017. His research is on the environmental history of the Jazira region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Zoe Griffith is Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, CUNY and completed her Ph.D. at Brown University in 2017. Her research focuses on political economy, law, and governance in the Ottoman Arab provinces from the 17th to the 19th centuries. She records mainly in New York City.

CREDITS

Episode No. 456
Release Date: 25 March 2020
Recording Location: Baruch College, New York, NY
Audio editing by Sam Dolbee and Chris Gratien
Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Big Road of Burravoe," "Petite Route," "Fast," "Saez"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Harun Küçük at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/03/science-ottoman-empire.html

Science in Early Modern Istanbul | Harun Küçük

Episode 2 of our series "The Making of the Islamic World" deals with the history of the first two imperial dynasties: the Umayyads and the Abbasids.

The Imperial Caliphates

More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/09/persianate.html

Rumi's World

For more visit https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/12/islamic-law.html

What is Islamic Law?

E477 | Bu bölümde Dr. Toygun Altıntaş ile Ermeni siyasi aktivistleri ve devrimcilerinin 1880 ve 90'lı yıllarda Doğu ve Orta Anadolu'daki faaliyetleri üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Altıntaş'ın II. Abdülhamid dönemi politikalarıyla Ermeni devrimci hareketi arasındaki ilişkiye odaklanan çalışması, bu hareketin Osmanlı toplumunun farklı kesimleri ve uluslararası aktörlerle olan çok yönlü ve karmaşık etkileşimini inceliyor.  Bu bağlamda hukukun üstlendiği role dikkati çeken ve Ermeni kadınlarının bu sürece nasıl müdahil olduğunu detaylandıran araştırma, Osmanlı Ermeni çalışmaları ve II. Abdülhamid Dönemi tarih yazımına önemli katkılar sunuyor.

Toygun Altıntaş geç dönem Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda eşitsizlik ve azınlıklaştırmanın siyasi ve toplumsal tarihiyle ilgileniyor. Doktorasını Şikago Üniversitesi'nin Yakın Doğu Dilleri ve Medeniyetleri Bölümü’nde tamamladı. Bilgi ve Boğaziçi üniversitelerinde dersler verdi. 2020-2022 yılları arasında Humboldt bursiyeri olarak Almanya'da çalışmalarına devam edecek.

Can Gümüş Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü'ndeki doktora çalışmalarına, geç Osmanlı dönemi kentlerinde halk sağlığı ve kentleşme ilişkisini incelediği araştırmasıyla devam ediyor.

YAPIM VE YAYIN

Bölüm No. 477
Yayınlanma Tarihi: 21 Eylül 2020
Kayıt Yeri: Bomonti, Istanbul
Müzik: Habrban by Komitas (performed by Sato Moughalian and Alyssa Reit) 
Ses Editörü: Can Gümüş 
https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/09/altintas.html

II. Abdülhamid Dönemi'nde Devrimciler, Ermeniler ve Rejim | Toygun Altıntaş

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/12/fatimids.html

Fragments of the Fatimid Caliphate

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/11/andalus.html

The Making of the Islamic World

Legacies of al-Andalus

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/11/crusades.html

The Crusades in an Islamic Context

The Mongols and Muslim Societies

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/11/life-in-mamluk-sultanate.html

Life in the Mamluk Sultanate

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/12/west-africa.html

Islam at a Crossroads in West Africa

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/01/early-modern.html

The Early Modern Islamic World

E490 | In 1919, Paraskevi Kyrias went to Paris to advocate for Albanian independence. As a woman in the overwhelmingly masculine space of international diplomacy, she faced sexism and unwanted romantic overtures. Nevertheless, she called on her connections within a global Protestant community, her life in diaspora in the United States, and her experiences at the elite Constantinople Girls' School to play a unique role in the Albanian campaign for independence after World War I. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Nevila Pahumi about Kyrias' story, her leadership of the early Albanian women's movement, and the diary of her experiences in Paris she left behind. We also trace the history of this remarkable woman after 1919, as she and her family were repudiated by a secularizing Albanian state determined to excise Protestant activism from their national history--until she was once again remade as a feminist icon in the last years of her life.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/01/pahumi.html

Nevila Pahumi works on the history of women's education and their emergence in the public sphere in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans. She graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a PhD in History in 2016, and between 2016-2018 she held the Alexander Nash Fellowship in Albanian Studies at UCL's School of Slavonic and Southeast European Studies. She has published two-dissertation related articles in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies and CLIO and taught a range of topics on Eastern Europe including women, gender, and sexuality after socialism. Her research and writing have been generously supported by an IIE Fulbright Fellowship, the Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, as well as a combination of research and writing grants from the University of Michigan's Weiser Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East Eurasian Studies, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Rackham Graduate School.

Susanna Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Smith College. She writes and teaches on the history of gender, sexuality, and political thought in the modern Arab world.

CREDITS

Episode No. 490
Release Date: 21 January 2021
Recording Location: Charlottesville, VA / Northampton, MA
Sound production by Susanna Ferguson and Chris Gratien
Music: "Chuperlika," Music of the Balkans, Gogofski; Eduardo Vandaa - VALSES DE PARIS; Henry King and his Hotel Pierre Orch - April in Paris; Marko Melkon and Nick Doneff - Geozlerinden Bellidir  
Special thanks to Sam Dolbee
Images and bibliography courtesy of Nevila Pahumi available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/01/pahumi.html

Paraskevi Kyrias, Albania, and the US at the Paris Peace Conference | Nevila Pahumi

E495 | Bu bölümde Dr. Çiğdem Oğuz ile I. Dünya Savaşı’nda Osmanlı’da "ahlak buhranı"nı tartışıyoruz. "Ahlaki çöküş" ya da "ahlak buhranı" söylemlerinin farklı entelektüellerce nasıl kullanıldığını inceleyen Oğuz’un çalışması, bu tartışmalara odaklanmanın Osmanlı toplumunun söz konusu dönemde geçirdiği politik, siyasi ve kültürel dönüşümleri anlamada bir anahtar görevi üstleneceğini iddia ediyor. Oğuz aynı zamanda, bu tartışmaların ve ahlakı korumaya yönelik atılan adımların politik alanın yanı sıra, aileye ve toplumsal cinsiyet ilişkilerine yansımalarını da araştırıyor. 

https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/02/oguz.html

Çiğdem Oğuz lisansını ODTÜ Tarih Bölümü’nde, yüksek lisansını Boğaziçi Üniversitesi'nde, doktorasını ise çift diploma programıyla Leiden ve Boğaziçi üniversitelerinde tamamlamıştır. Bolonya Üniversitesi'nde öğretim üyesi olan Oğuz’un çalışmaları geç Osmanlı dönemi devlet-toplum ilişkisi, savaş ve cephe gerisi, Osmanlı'da savaş ve vatandaşlık kavramının dönüşümü ve toplumsal cinsiyet konularına odaklanmaktadır.

Can Gümüş Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü'ndeki doktora çalışmalarına, geç Osmanlı dönemi kentlerinde halk sağlığı ve kentleşme ilişkisini incelediği araştırmasıyla devam ediyor.

YAPIM VE YAYIN

Bölüm No: 495
Yayınlanma Tarihi: 28 Şubat 2021
Kayıt yeri: Pisa / İstanbul
Ses Editörü: Can Gümüş
Müzik: Harmandalı – Recep Efendi & Cemal Efendi; Ha Bu Diyar – Muzaffer Akgün
Görseller ve Kaynakça Çiğdem Oğuz’un müsaadesiyle

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