Ottoman History Podcast

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/baris-unlu" target="_blank"> with Barış Ünlü </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">hosted by Chris Gratien</a><a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/kubra-sagir" target="_blank"> and Kubra Sagir</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What does it mean to be Turkish? In this episode, we examine that question with sociologist Barış Ünlü. In <a href="https://tupress.temple.edu/books/the-turkishness-contract" target="_blank"><i>The Turkishness Contract</i></a>, Ünlü studies the historical process by which Turkishness developed through a contractual relationship between the state and its citizens. In our conversation, we explore the late Ottoman roots of this process, as well as how the experiences of non-Turkish religious and ethnolinguistic groups shed light onto the often unspoken and unconscious behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that govern Turkishness. We also discuss the book's <a href="https://www.dipnotkitap.com/kitap/turkluk-sozlesmesi/246" target="_blank">wide reception in Turkish</a> and how in its new English translation, Ünlü connects the Turkish experience to global perspectives on race and belonging in the modern world. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/03/turkishness-contract.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/elizabeth-r-varon" target="_blank"> with Elizabeth Varon </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">hosted by Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | After the US Civil War, some leaders of the defeated Confederacy followed unusual trajectories, perhaps none more so than James Longstreet, who joined the Republican party to become a proponent of Southern Reconstruction and for a brief period, the Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Varon, author of a new biography of Longstreet, about the rebel-turned-diplomat's brief tenure in the Ottoman capital during the early years of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's reign, and we discuss what Longstreet's experiences reveal about America on the world stage in the shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We also discuss Prof. Varon's personal connection to post-Ottoman Istanbul, as well as her new research about Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, who followed in Longstreet's footsteps some years later on a humanitarian mission to the Ottoman Armenians in Anatolia. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/03/longstreet.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://esmatelhalaby.com/" target="_blank"> with Esmat Elhalaby </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://www.smith.edu/people/susanna-ferguson" target="_blank">hosted by Susanna Ferguson</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | How did Palestine become central to anti-imperial movements and thought in the global south? In this episode, Esmat Elhalaby asks how Arabs and South Asians contended with the “parting gifts of empire” in the long twentieth century, often by turning to Palestine. He talks about how Arab writers in conversation with India reinvented Orientalism as a critique of empire and reinterpreted the political possibilities and limitations of Islam as a political force. We close with a discussion of Esmat’s new work on the intellectual history of Gaza, the importance of talking about “bad Palestinians,” and what it means to write history at a time of genocide. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/02/elhalaby.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://integrative.gmu.edu/people/sbalakia" target="_blank"> with Sophia Balakian </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/brittany-white" target="_blank">hosted by Brittany White</a><a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank"> and Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | The word "refugee" might conjure images of families devastated by war fleeing their homeland. But what happens when those who seek asylum abroad do not conform to that image? As Sophia Balakian argues in her new book <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/unsettled-families" target="_blank"><i>Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship</i></a>, the question is one that shapes the case of every refugee seeking a new home abroad in the United States. The Somali and Congolese migrants in her study face an intense vetting process that includes DNA testing to confirm that a refugee family forms a biological unit, creating numerous reasons by which people who have survived war and displacement may be judged "fraudulent" families. In this episode, Balakian is back on the podcast to share an anthropologist's perspective on the history of migration and the politics of kinship in refugee resettlement. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/01/balakian.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://library.brown.edu/create/libnews/gwendolyn-collaco/" target="_blank"> featuring Gwendolyn Collaço </a></div><br> <div class="host_name"> <a href="https://independent.academia.edu/AndrasRiedlmayer" target="_blank">with Andras Riedlmayer </a>and <a href="https://pleasuresofpasttimes.com/history/" target="_blank">Paul Drummond</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | While killing time at the Booksellers' Row in Westminster, historian and curator Gwendolyn Collaço stumbled on a collection of postcards from early 20th-century Egypt, some featuring the British burlesque artist Miss Kitty Lord. When she realized that the postcards were a set belonging to a single person — none other than Kitty Lord herself — the chance discovery became a research quest that culminated in an exhibition at Harvard Fine Arts Library, presenting a visual time capsule of Belle Époque Cairo that mapped the social and romantic life of a fascinating and little-known figure. In this episode from the Ottoman History Podcast vault, Collaço discusses what she uncovered about Kitty Lord through collaborations with the historian and bibliographer András Riedlmayer and memorobilia shop owner Paul Drummond, who appear in the podcast to share their side of the story. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/01/kitty-lord.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> Emine Şahin</div> <div class="host_name"> Sunucu: Can Gümüş</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Bağdat, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu için coğrafi uzaklığına rağmen merkezî idarenin vazgeçilmez vilayetlerinden biriydi. Tanzimat’tan itibaren bu önem, yalnızca askerî güvenlik veya sınır politikalarıyla sınırlı kalmadı; idarî modernleşme, ekonomik düzenlemeler ve toplumsal kontrol mekanizmalarının uygulandığı başlıca laboratuvarlardan biri haline geldi. II. Meşrutiyet’in ilanı ise bu denemeleri daha iddialı, daha sert ve daha merkezî bir siyasi programa dönüştürdü. Bu bölümde, Dr. Emine Şahin’le birlikte 1908–1917 arasında Bağdat’ta Osmanlı idaresinin dönüşümünü inceliyoruz. Merkezileşme politikalarının sahada nasıl uygulandığını, hangi aktörler aracılığıyla yürütüldüğünü ve yerel toplum tarafından nasıl karşılandığını tartışıyoruz. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/12/sahin.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/shafir.html" target="_blank"> with Nir Shafir </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="http://mpatton.faculty.wesleyan.edu" target="_blank">hosted by Maryam Patton</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | The seventeenth century has often been characterized as a period of disorder and religious polemics in the Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, Nir Shafir takes us inside his award-winning new book, which argues that the polemics of the early modern Ottoman world were fueled in part by changes in communication, namely the rise of short pamphlets that circulated easily in handwritten copies. Pamphlets created a new arena largely independent from the institutional centers of knowledge production where people debated everyday questions of the time about what it meant to be Muslim. In exploring the world of Ottoman pamphlets, Shafir also offers a new introduction to the nature of Ottoman education, book production, and reading practices prior to the rise of print and modern state institutions. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/12/shafir.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://shireenhamza.com/" target="_blank"> produced by Shireen Hamza</a></div><br> <div class="host_name"> and featuring <br>Fahad Bishara, KD Thompson, Liana Saif, <br>Mahmood Kooria, Rebecca Hankins, and Samantha Pellegrino</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What could historians have to say about a fantasy novel? The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, published in 2023, follows an aging mother and captain on magical adventures across the twelfth-century Indian Ocean world with her crew. It has been read widely, hitting bestseller lists in the US and being translated into eight languages. In this episode, a group of historians discusses the novel with its author, Shannon Chakraborty. Our conversation covers gender and geography, language and literature, piety and piracy, and of course, magic. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/11/chakraborty.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> Nurçin İleri, Emine Öztaner ve Meltem Kocaman</div> <div class="host_name"> Sunucu: Can Gümüş</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Bu bölümde, Nurçin İleri, Emine Öztaner ve Meltem Kocaman ile elektriğin Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e uzanan süreçte gündelik yaşamı ve toplumsal ilişkileri nasıl dönüştürdüğünü tartışıyoruz. İstanbul’un ilk aydınlatma girişimlerinden sanayi tesislerine, tramvay hatlarından ev içi teknolojilere uzanan örneklerle, teknolojik yeniliklerin yalnızca kent altyapılarını değil, aynı zamanda kentlilerin yaşam tahayyüllerini de nasıl şekillendirdiğini inceliyoruz. İleri’nin derlediği Bir Cereyan Hasıl Oldu: Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e İstanbul’da Elektrikli Yaşam (Tarih Vakfı, 2024) başlıklı kitabı temel alan sohbetimizde, elektriğin, bir teknik yenilik olmanın ötesinde, modernleşme, emek, toplumsal cinsiyet ve kamusal alan gibi kesişen temalar etrafında yeni bir toplumsal düzenin ve kültürel dönüşümün parçası hâline gelişini konuşuyoruz. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/11/cereyan.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://americanstudies.nd.edu/faculty/perin-gurel/" target="_blank"> with Perin Gürel </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">hosted by Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race shaped the terms of the assymetrical relations between the US and other countries in the region. We discuss the "daddy issues" reflected in comparisons between the founding figures of the Republic of Turkey and Iran's monarchy, the changing image of Iran's empress on the global stage, and the ambivalent claims to whiteness and anti-imperialism that took shape in both countries. Throughout the conversation, we return to a critique of comparison as a placeholder for knowledge and a political instrument wielded with varying degrees of success to further American foreign policy goals, and we reflect on how this American project has shaped how all of us conceptualize the region's major social and political questions today. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/10/gurel.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.uu.nl/staff/RACalis1" target="_blank"> with Richard Calis </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="http://mpatton.faculty.wesleyan.edu" target="_blank">hosted by Maryam Patton</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled a remarkable ethnographic and scholarly account of Greek life under Ottoman rule in his seminal <i>Turcograecia</i>. Though he never left his home in Tübingen, Crusius spent decades corresponding with a far-flung network of intermediaries, including the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. He annotated books and manuscripts, and even interviewed Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who passed through Germany. In this episode, Richard Calis explores how Crusius’s fascination with the so-called Ottoman Greeks sheds light on broader early modern debates about cultural and religious difference and how Greek identity became entangled with orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Turks, both omnipresent and strangely absent in Crusius’s research, emerge in unexpected places, including in his dreams. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/10/calis.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://stanford.academia.edu/EmreCanDaglioglu" target="_blank"> Emre Can Dağlıoğlu </a></div> <div class="host_name"> Sunucu: Can Gümüş & Önder Eren Akgül</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Emre Can Dağlıoğlu’nun <a href="https://iletisim.com.tr/kitap/araplarin-1915-i/10111?srsltid=AfmBOoqWL9Jw-T0JxSg44VEi3eDGvdnjlnutkc3R28LMO2Wih5br7csf">Arapların 1915’i: Soykırım, Kimlik, Coğrafya</a> başlıklı derlemesine (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2022) odaklanan bu bölüm, 1915’i Osmanlı ve Osmanlı sonrası Arap dünyası bağlamında ele almanın önemine işaret ediyor. Hem soykırımı hem de 1915 sonrasını bölgenin siyasal, toplumsal ve çevresel krizleri içinde konumlandıran çalışma, Arap vilayetlerine sürülen Ermenilerin karşılaştıkları politikaları, hayatta kalma stratejilerini, Arap toplumları ve coğrafyasıyla kurdukları karmaşık ilişkileri inceleyen makalelerden oluşuyor. Bu podcastte, bu çalışmaların soykırımın tarihyazımında açtığı yeni pencereleri detaylandırırken 1915’i sabit bir kırılma anı olarak görmek yerine, farklı yerel dinamikler ve ilişkiler çerçevesinde zamansal ve mekânsal olarak genişleyen bir perspektifle ele almanın imkânları üzerine de sohbet ediyoruz. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/03/daglioglu.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.cas.lehigh.edu/faculty-staff/ugur-zekeriya-pece#research" target="_blank"> with Uğur Z. Peçe </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/samuel-dolbee/">hosted by Sam Dolbee</a></div><br> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In the 1890s, Ottoman Crete descended into communal violence between its Christian and Muslim inhabitants, abetted by foreign powers and Ottoman officials alike. In this episode, Uğur Z. Peçe explains how this conflict--which he calls a civil war--came about, what it meant in people's intimately connected everyday lives, and how it shaped the end of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, Cretan refugees resettled elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire became a key part of various protest movements including boycotts. Uğur speaks with us about these topics while traveling through present-day Crete, considering, among other things, the unexpected connections between the Eastern Black Sea and Crete, the island's distinctive landscape, and snails. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/12/pece.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.smith.edu/people/susanna-ferguson" target="_blank"> with Susanna Ferguson </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Chris Gratien</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What does the history of modern Arab political thought look like from the perspective of women authors? In this podcast, we sit down with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Susanna Ferguson to explore this question, which animates her new book <i>Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought</i>. Previous scholarship has focused on the role of women in discussing the roles of women, but as Prof. Ferguson argues, women writers of the 19th and 20th century can also be studied as producers of social theory and commentators on the important matters of their era. In our conversation, we use the lens of public discourse about child-rearing or <i>tarbiyah</i> as a window onto ideas about a wide range of topics, including morality, labor, and democratic governance. In doing so, we consider the importance of seeing the Arab world as a source of portable ideas about modern society, as opposed to a merely passive recipient of Western modernity. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/09/sferg.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/h/peter-hill/" target="_blank"> with Peter Hill </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Matthew Ghazarian</div><br> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Across the 19th century Arab East, or Mashriq, there were two simultaneous but seemingly contradictory trends afoot. On the one hand, new ways of understanding religion, science, and community, often associated with the intellectual 'revival' of the Arab Nahda, ushered in new forms of thought and more fluid subjectivities. On the other hand, movements emerged to reinscribe, intensify, and uphold stricter communal boundaries between religious groups. How did these two trends coexist? The life and thought of Mikha'il Mishaqa (1800-1888) offer some answers. Mishaqa was a doctor, merchant, moneylender, and writer who was raised in Greek Catholicism, lost his faith, regained it, and then converted to Protestantism. Through his many-sided life, his voluminous writings, and his obstinate commitment to 'reason', Mishaqa offers an example of how a single life could integrate these seemingly contradictory trends of 19th century Arab East. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/09/peter-hill.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fmi/institut/mitglieder/Wissenschaftliche_Mitarbeiterinnen_und_Mitarbeiter/Yilmaz.html" target="_blank">with İlkay Yılmaz</a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/samuel-dolbee/">hosted by Sam Dolbee</a></div><br> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Passports are objects at once momentous and mundane. How did they come about in the late Ottoman Empire? In this episode, İlkay Yılmaz discusses the history of this technology, and how the state effort to manage information about identity and control people's movement emerged alongside international police efforts to control anarchist and revolutionary subjects between different empires in the late nineteenth century. With this new technology, the ability to control people's movement also became contingent on the photograph and connected to late Ottoman politics of migration and ethnicity. She also discusses how these state efforts to limit people's movement through the technology of the passport have echoes in the present, even in her own life. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/09/yilmaz.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.global.ucsb.edu/people/vladimir-hamed-troyansky" target="_blank"> with Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">hosted by Chris Gratien</a><a href="https://boun.academia.edu/YeterCanG%C3%BCm%C3%BC%C5%9F" target="_blank"> & Can Gümüş</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | During the late 19th and early 20th century, tens of millions of migrants crossed the seas, settling in the Americas and beyond in a mass migration event that reshaped politics and economies throughout the world. In this episode, we focus on one of the most ignored groups within the history of those momentous events: North Caucasian Muslims. As our guest, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, explains, North Caucasian refugees fleeing Russian expansion became a large segment of the Ottoman migrant (muhacir) population and in turn, became a major new demographic component, constituting about 5% of the empire's citizens by WWI. Under the Muhacirin Commission created to facilitate their movements, they settled in remote provinces, from the edges of the Syrian desert to the plateaus of Central Anatolia, founding what would become major cities like Amman (modern-day Jordan) and constructing new diasporic identities in the process. As we discuss, these migrations not only changed the millions of people who became Ottoman refugees during the empire's last decade and their communities back home. They changed the nature of the Ottoman state itself. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/08/hamed-troyansky.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.alikulez.com/research" target="_blank"> with Ali Kulez </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Sam Dolbee</div><br> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In 1866, a series of unexpected events led to an Ottoman imam by the name of Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi ending up in Rio de Janeiro. In this episode, Ali Kulez explains how he got there, and what happened when al-Baghdadi became close with enslaved and free Afro-Brazilian Muslims, and attempted to teach them his vision of Islamic orthodoxy. In addition to exploring themes of Islam and race in Brazil, Kulez also traces how the translation of al-Baghdadi's travel narrative can offer a window onto the history of South-South relations into the present. In closing, he discusses the challenge of evaluating past solidarities and differentiating them from those we might want to see. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/04/kulez.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://twitter.com/simongandrew" target="_blank"> with Andrew Simon,</a> <a href="https://eume-berlin.academia.edu/AliaMossallam" target="_blank">Alia Mossallam,</a><a href="https://neareasternstudies.cornell.edu/ziad-fahmy" target="_blank"> and Ziad Fahmy </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | The Egyptian revolution of 2011 is one of the most spectacular examples of how social media has played a pivotal role in political movements of the 21st century. However, in this final installment of our four-part series on "<a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/the-sound-of-revolution-in-modern-egypt.html" target="_blank">The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt</a>," we argue that the true beginning of Egypt's media revolution arrived with the cassette tape, which for the first time, made it possible for every Egyptian to be a producer rather than a passive consumer of popular culture. As our guest Andrew Simon explains, this veritable "media of the masses" was not only a means of disseminating commercial music. Western pop music and classics of the Nasserist era mingled with new underground music, religious content, home recordings, and personal voice messages on Egyptian cassettes, which circumvented and subverted state censorship. Artists like Sheikh Imam and the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm produced celebrated political satire that defined the sound of the <i>Infitah</i> era, much to the chagrin of state authorities and the commercial recording industry. In 2011, when Egyptians took to the streets to protest the Mubarak regime, Imam's songs along with a century of sound stretching back to the First World War filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, as a new generation produced new sounds of revolution. We conclude our series with reflections from Alia Mossallam and Ziad Fahmy on the sounds of the square in 2011 and what they reveal about change and continuity in Egyptian politics. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/12/simon.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.leenadallasheh.com/" target="_blank"> with Leena Dallasheh </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | As an Arab city inside the 1948 borders of Israel, Nazareth defies many of the general narratives of both Israeli and Palestinian histories. But as our guest Leena Dallasheh explains, that does not mean that Nazareth is necessarily an exception. In fact, its paradoxical survival is key to understanding the history of modern Palestinian politics. In this conversation, we chart the history of Nazareth's rise from provincial town to Palestinian cultural capital. We consider the reasons why Nazareth survived the Nakba, and we explore the important role of Palestinian communities in the years before and decades after the foundation of Israel. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/03/dallasheh.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://kirklareliuniversity.academia.edu/SeymaAfacan" target="_blank"> Şeyma Afacan </a></div> <div class="host_name"> Sunucu: <a href="https://boun.academia.edu/YeterCanG%C3%BCm%C3%BC%C5%9F" target="_blank"> Can Gümüş </a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Bu bölümde, Dr. Şeyma Afacan ile geç Osmanlı’da biyolojik materyalizm, psikolojinin gelişimi ve Afacan’ın bir “ezber bozma alanı” olarak nitelediği duygular tarihi üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Osmanlı’da materyalizm tartışmalarının eksikliklerine işaret eden Afacan, beden, duygu ve üretkenlik arasındaki ilişkiye odaklanmanın bu çalışmalara sunabileceği olası katkılara dikkati çekiyor ve biyolojik materyalizm tartışmasının her şeyden evvel “psikolojik bir tartışma” olduğunu öne sürüyor. Afacan tarih yazımında duyguları analitik bir kategori olarak kullanmanın imkânlarını ve kısıtlarını da detaylandırıyor. Afacan’ın bu söyleşide çizdiği genel çerçevenin bir izleğini Toplumsal Tarih’in Ocak 2024 sayısı için derlediği dosyadaki çalışmalarda görmek de mümkün. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/03/afacan.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://newcastleuni.academia.edu/%C3%9CmitKurt" target="_blank"> with Ümit Kurt </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Sam Dolbee</div><br> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What were the economic forces that drove the violence of the Armenian genocide? In this episode, historian Ümit Kurt speaks about his research on the role of property in the history of the dispossession and deportation of Aintab’s Armenian community. Despite archival silences, he reveals the central role of legal mechanisms and local propertied elites in these processes. In closing, he discusses the legacies of the “economics of genocide” into the present day, and how his research has been received. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/02/kurt.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://eume-berlin.academia.edu/AliaMossallam" target="_blank"> with Alia Mossallam </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/chris-gratien" target="_blank">Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In 1952, a coup d'état led by Gamal Abdel Nasser ushered in a revolutionary period of Egyptian history in which sound played an integral role in shaping collective political consciousness. The culture of the 50s and 60s was dominated by songs by artists like Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez that still resonate within national consciousness, but as we explore in this third installment of our four-part series on "<a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/the-sound-of-revolution-in-modern-egypt.html" target="_blank">The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt</a>," the period produced spectacular sound as well as conspicous silence. As our guest Alia Mossallam explains, triumphant musical celebrations of the Egyptian state's signature achievement --- the construction of the Aswan High Dam --- shaped the terms through which Egyptians have come to remember this period. At the same time, songs of workers and Nubian villagers displaced by the dam captured subaltern sentiments beneath the surface of Nasserist cultural hegemony. We conclude our conversation with a reflection on the singular importance of sources like folk songs for writing histories erased by official sources. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/12/mossallam.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.ceu.edu/people/brett-wilson" target="_blank"> with Brett Wilson </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://virginia.academia.edu/BrittanyWhite" target="_blank">hosted by Brittany White</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Set between elite households and a Sufi lodge, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's 1922 novel <i>Nur Baba</i> was a provocative take on competing notions of religion, morality, gender, and romance in the dynamic world of late Ottoman Istanbul. In this episode, we speak to Brett Wilson, author of the first-ever English translation of Karaosmanoğlu's controversial classic. We discuss Yakup Kadri's ethnographic approach to his subject, its mixed reception, and the insights it offers about modern Turkish culture. We also discuss the joys of translation, and its importance for students of Ottoman history today. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/01/nur-baba.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://menas.arizona.edu/person/maha-nassar" target="_blank"> with Maha Nassar </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Susanna Ferguson</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | 1948 marks the year that Israel gained independence, and for Palestinians, an experience of mass exile known as the Nakba. The displacement of Palestinians and subsequent conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors had immense consequences. But how did the Palestinian Arabs who remained and make up roughly 20% of Israel's population today fit into a Middle East region defined by the "Arab-Israeli conflict?" In this podcast, we speak to Maha Nassar, whose first book <i>Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World</i> casts new light on a community historically marginalized both within Israel and within broader discussions of contemporary Arab history. We discuss how Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends, relatives, and compatriots after 1948, and how they used literature as means of forging new transnational connections during the era of Arab nationalism and decolonization. Through the insights born out of their paradoxical experiences, Arab-Israeli authors of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction would come to occupy a prominent place not only within both Arab and Israeli literature but also global political thought. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/01/nassar.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.columbia.edu/person/khalidi-rashid/" target="_blank"> with Ziad Fahmy </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/profile/crg8w" target="_blank">Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | During the interwar period, the recording industry reshaped Egyptian culture and politics through music. But as we discuss in part two of our four-part series on "<a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/the-sound-of-revolution-in-modern-egypt.html" target="_blank">The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt</a>," everyday sounds of the city are no less part of Egypt's political history. As our guest Ziad Fahmy explains, writing sonic history requires listening to the sources with ears attuned to the sentiments and sensibilities of past people. Together, we listen to a early recording of Egyptian street sounds and explore the world of sound that awaits within the textual record, focusing on how class dynamics played out on the soundscape of Cairo and Alexandria. We also consider how the rise of a new medium, radio, began to reshape the sonic life of ordinary Egyptians during the interwar period, paving the way for the media revolution of the 1950s and 60s. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/12/fahmy.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://telaviv.academia.edu/avnerwishnitzer" target="_blank"> with Avner Wishnitzer </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Sam Dolbee</div><br> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/history/middle-east-history/night-falls-eighteenth-century-ottoman-cities-after-dark?format=HB&isbn=9781108832144">As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark</a> </i>(also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as <i><a href="https://www.folkitap.com/gece-cokerken">Gece Çökerken</a></i>). He explains how the night was a time for sleep, rest, devotion, sex, crime, drinking, and even revolt. He also talks about the challenges of past sensory states, the influence of the late Walter Andrews on his work, and, finally, the relationship between his work as a historian and his work as an activist. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/09/wishnitzer.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://kylejanderson.com/" target="_blank"> with Kyle Anderson &</a> <a href="https://eume-berlin.academia.edu/AliaMossallam" target="_blank">Alia Mossallam </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://history.virginia.edu/people/profile/crg8w" target="_blank">hosted by Chris Gratien</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In the aftermath of the First World War, the Egyptian streets rose up against British rule during a period of global anti-imperialism, and the voices of the 1919 revolution have echoed throughout Egyptian history ever since. In this first installment of our four-part series on "<a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/the-sound-of-revolution-in-modern-egypt.html" target="_blank">The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt</a>," we consider how the First World War reshaped political consciousness in Egypt, as our guests Kyle Anderson and Alia Mossallam explore the experiences of the Egyptian Labor Corps and the sonic history of WWI. We examine the adventure, hardship, exile, and abuse Egyptian workers faced serving the British war effort, as well as how the war changed the society they returned to, in the words of one famous song from the period, "safe and sound." In discussing the popular songs of the war period that entered Egyptian national canon, our guests illuminate the ways in which shared songs can be modified and repurposed for new political contexts, drawing attention to the need for reconstructing the layers of context contained within some of history's earliest sound recordings. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/12/elc.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/who-we-are/jessica-marglin" target="_blank"> with Jessica Marglin </a></div><div class="host_name"> <a href="https://virginia.academia.edu/BrittanyWhite" target="_blank">hosted by Brittany White</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In 1873, Nissim Shamama died suddenly at his palazzo in Livorno. He was quietly one of the richest men in the Mediterranean. A Tunisian Jew born in the Ottoman Empire, Shamama had taken his place among the mercantile elite of a newly-unified Italy. He was a man who belonged to many places. But to whom would his vast inheritance belong? Our guest Jessica Marglin has published an award-winning book, <i>The Shamama Case</i>, that marshals an impressive array of archival sources to investigate how this question was resolved. As she demonstrates, the decade-long legal dispute over Shamama's estate was an international affair involving Tunisian officials, rabbis from throughout the Mediterranean, and some of Italy's foremost legal minds. In this conversation, we talk to Marglin about some of the highlights of the Shamama case, what it taught her about the history of citizenship and nationality in the 19th century Mediterranean, and the power of microhistory for disrupting conventional framings of the period. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/11/marglin.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<br> <div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.columbia.edu/person/khalidi-rashid/" target="_blank"> with Rashid Khalidi </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://oxford.academia.edu/ZeinabAzarbadegan" target="_blank">Zeinab Azarbadegan</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In this episode, Rashid Khalidi discusses his latest book <i>The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017</i>, where he defines Zionism not only as a nationalist project in conflict with the Palestinian one, but also a settler colonial project supported by the British and later the American imperialism. We begin in the late Ottoman period as Khalidi examines the familiar episodes and key turning points, which he characterizes as declaratations of war and wagings of war on Palestinians. We discuss the 1917 Balfour declaration and the communal conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine that led to the general strike and Arab revolt of 1936. The 1948 war, the Palestinian Nakba, and the creation of the State of Israel provide the backdrop for Cold War period conflicts, the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the outbreak of the First Intifada, which culminated in the Oslo Accords of 1993-95. Khalidi reflects on his experiences with the failures of Oslo, which set the stage for the rise of Hamas in Gaza and periodic sieges that have continued to the present day. We conclude with a consideration of the current war, situating the unprecedented civilian toll of both the attacks by Hamas in Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip within Khalidi's larger narrative of more than a century of war on Palestine. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/11/khalidi.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://fsu.academia.edu/Nilay%C3%96zokG%C3%BCndo%C4%9Fan" target="_blank"> with Nilay Özok-Gündoğan </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Sam Dolbee</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | As the Ottoman state expanded in the sixteenth century, it extended a number of privileges to elite families in Kurdistan. In this episode, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan discusses her new book The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire, which explains how these hereditary privileges—unique in the empire—developed and changed in the region of Palu between this moment and the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state attempted to rescind such autonomy. Writing against scholarship that either ignores such families or understands them only in nationalist terms, Özok-Gündoğan attends to property, labor, and mineral extraction and how they ultimately all shaped the nature of the unprecedented violence at the end of empire. She also discusses her own journey writing this book, including her time teaching in Mardin and eventually being forced to leave Turkey. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/09/ozok.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name_smaller"> <a href="https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/SamDolbee" target="_blank">Samuel Dolbee</a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Chris Gratien and Reem Bailony</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/05/dolbee.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-ayse-zarakol" target="_blank"> with Ayşe Zarakol </a></div> <div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://columbia.academia.edu/ZeinabAzarbadegan" target="_blank">Zeinab Azarbadegan</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What did the international system look like before the rise of the West? What was the place of the Ottomans within it? How did the Ottomans claimed sovereignty and recognition from other states in the sixteenth century world order? In this episode Ayşe Zarakol discusses the rise and fall of Eastern world orders from the Mongol times to the mid-eighteenth century. She critically interrogates both Euro-centric and Sino-centric histories of international relations in order to emphasise the Chingisid universal claims and their evolution throughout the centuries. Considering the Ottomans within this longue duree history, Zarakol emphasises the notion of millenial sovereignty that put the Ottomans in competition with the Safavids and the Mughals and how the crisis of the seventeenth century dismantled this world order and contributed to a sense of decline. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/05/zarakol.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://elizabethgraver.com/" target="_blank"> with Elizabeth Graver </a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Brittany White</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | Elizabeth Graver grew up knowing her grandmother Rebecca was from the Ottoman Empire and that her tumultuous, meandering life journey, like many in the Ottoman Sephardi diaspora, had taken her to Spain, Cuba, and finally, the United States. Like so many of us, she wanted to know more about her family history. Graver was twenty-one when she recorded her first interviews with her grandmother. Over the decades, this family history project would eventually become <i>Kantika</i>-—a historical novel inspired by the multigenerational story of Graver's family. In <i>Kantika</i>, she crafts compelling fiction from historical facts as she retraces her grandmother’s journey. Our conversation with Graver will explore familiar themes like migration, displacement, identity, and belonging after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And we’ll also reflect on the possibilities and challenges of writing intimate family histories as literature and how fiction can help us better conceptualize and understand the past. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/05/kantika.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name_smaller"> <a href="https://arizona.academia.edu/LindaDarling" target="_blank">Linda Darling</a></div><div class="host_name"> hosted by Sam Dolbee</div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | In this episode, Linda Darling discusses the history of tax administration in the early modern Ottoman Empire, and how attention to it can open up a broad range of questions about technology, governance, and military power and, in the process, dispell simplistic stereotypes such as the "Sick Man of Europe." In addition, she speaks more broadly about her path to Ottoman history, her studies with Halil Inalcık, and how she came to write a book about tax administration. In closing, she touches on what projects--on the cusp of retirement--she is thinking about now.</div>. <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/04/darling.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="https://history.cornell.edu/mostafa-minawi" target="_blank"> with Mostafa Minawi </a></div> <div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://columbia.academia.edu/ZeinabAzarbadegan" target="_blank">Zeinab Azarbadegan</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What did it mean to be Arab during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire? What did it mean to be Arab and invested in continuation of the Ottoman Empire? In this episode Mostafa Minawi answers these questions by focusing on the lives of two Arab-Ottoman Imperialists from the same family in Damascus, the al-'Azm or Azamzade family. By recounting their lives, excavating their writings, and narrating how their descendants remember them, Minawi explores questions of belonging, race and ethnicity, and the emotional world of a family divided by the fracturing of an centuries-old empire. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/03/minawi.html#more">« Click for More »</a>

<div class="guest_name"> <a href="" target="_blank"> with Wendy M. K. Shaw </a></div> <div class="host_name"> hosted by <a href="https://columbia.academia.edu/ZeinabAzarbadegan" target="_blank">Zeinab Azarbadegan</a></div> <div class="hidden_synopsis"> | What is an image in Islam? Is its permissibility the main preoccupation of Islamic discourses? In this episode, Wendy M.K. Shaw revisits the foundations of art history and considers their colonial and Eurocentric roots. She discusses the stories of art and artists that circulated in the Islamic world, not all of which were accompanied with images, in order to understand what the role of art and the artist were conceived of the pre-modern Islamic world. Redefining concepts such as the image, perspective, art, and history, she sketches the alternative Islamic perceptual culture in which seeing with the ear and seeing with the heart are central to understanding this world as the manifestation of the divine. </div> <a href="https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/11/shaw.html#more">« Click for More »</a>