New Books in Turkish Studies
Episodes
Anthony Kaldellis, "1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople" (Oxford UP, 2026)
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A detailed account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empir...
James Bultema, "Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016" (Springer, 2026)
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Free Enough to Grow: The Turkish Protestant Movement, 1961-2016 (Springer Nature, 2026), James Bultema identifies and investigates four central f...
David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, "Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science" (Yale UP, 2026)
21 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For nearly a century, every Democratic president—and many Republicans—entered office promising to restructure America’s health care system. Bara...
Prolepsis
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the op...
Sezai Ozan Zeybek, "Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Animals, Justice, and the Politics of Violence: Shared Struggles in Turkey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) by Dr. Sezai Ozan Zeybek explores the intricate...
Imran Mulla, "The Indian Caliphate, Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince" (Hurst, 2025)
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1924, the Republic of Turkey voted to abolish the Ottoman caliphate, ending a 400-year-long claim by the Ottomans that they were the leaders of the...
Julia Elyachar, "On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo" (Duke UP, 2025)
04 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis...
Jacob Daniels, "The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders" (Stanford UP, 2025)
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Edirne was a bustling center linking Istanbul to Ottoman Europe. It was also the capital of Edirne P...
James Grehan, "Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civili...
Paris Papamichos Chronakis, "The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule" (Stanford UP, 2024)
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule (Stanford UP, 2024) examines how the cosmopolitan bourg...
Selim Koru, "New Turkey and the Far Right: How Reactionary Nationalism Remade a Country" (I. B. Tauris, 2025)
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Turkey is among a league of revisionist powers who are challenging the world order. Erdogan and his Islamist movement have aimed to create the “New ...
Ara Sarafian et al., "Microhistories in Armenian Studies" (Cal State Fresno Press, 2025)
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The articles appearing in this volume were presented at a conference entitled “Microhistories in Armenian Studies” organized by the Armenian Studi...
Ünver Rüstem, "Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul" (Princeton UP, 2019)
27 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for tr...
Robert G. Morrison, "Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on kno...
Talin Suciyan, "Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
28 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The history of Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire has largely been narrated as a unique period of equality, reform, and progress, often framing it as the ...
Michelle Lynn Kahn, "Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? ...
Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025)
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience...
Richard Calis, "The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius" (Harvard UP, 2025)
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. ...
Ipek A. Celik Rappas, "Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location" (Cornell UP, 2025)
03 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. D...
Sinem Arcak Casale, "Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Otto...
Yaron Ayalon, "Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy" (Brill, 2024)
30 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Those of us who have some background in Jewish history are taught that the Ottoman Empire encouraged Jews, particularly those of the Spanish and Portu...
Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow, "Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, when we think about Gaza we think about the war, the destruction of the city and the constant movement of its population. In contemporary publi...
Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)
19 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the histo...
Yanni Kotsonis, "The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Yanni Kotsonis, Professor of History and Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University, is the author of The Greek Revolution and the Violent B...
The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of e...
Olga Borovaya, "The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
05 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Rhodes blood libel of 1840, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, was initiated by the island’s governor in collusion with Levantine merchants, w...
Serkan Görkemli, "Sweet Tooth and Other Stories" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressi...
Ege Selin Islekel, "Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
20 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intellig...
Nergis Ertürk, "Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union" (Columbia UP, 2024)
18 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia UP, 2024) examines political relations and literary translati...
Infrastructure, Development, and Racialization
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
International development projects supported by governments of wealthy countries, international financial institutions, and influential NGOs like the ...
Emrah Yildiz, "Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders" (U California Press, 2024)
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ...
Nick Lloyd, "The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918" (Norton, 2024)
06 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its sca...
Samuel J. Hirst, "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford UP, 2024)
28 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introd...
David M. Driesen, "The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power" (Stanford UP, 2021)
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether we have a republic or a monarchy. He replied “A Rep...
Michelle Tusan, "The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
27 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023), Michelle Tusan profoundly reshapes the stor...
Andrew R. Basso, "Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
13 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of fo...
Peter Hart, "The Gallipoli Evacuation" (Living History, 2020)
10 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most well-told episodes of the First World War, the 1915 Gallipoli expedition, also has its own long-ignored aspects - specifically, the st...
Bilge Yesil, "Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising play...
Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
20 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated mo...
Özge Çelikaslan, "Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma" (DPR Barcelona, 2024)
19 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and it...
Sultan vs Dracula
17 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An interview with renowned calligrapher and author Razwan ul-Haq talking about his graphic novel Sultan vs. Dracula (al-Oblong Books, 2012). Learn m...
Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and ...
Eugene Rogan, "The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World" (Basic Book, 2024)
08 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Basic Book, 2024) recreates one of the watershed moments in the ...
Aslı Zengin, "Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World" (Duke UP, 2024)
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke UP, 2024), Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creativel...
Vartan Matiossian, "The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and 'Medz Yeghern'" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and 'Medz Yeghern' (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the genealogy of the concept of 'Medz ...
Görkem Akgöz, "In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey" (Brill, 2023)
12 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific histo...
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State" (Stanford UP, 2024)
23 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
26 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a hist...
Alexander Christie-Miller, "To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
08 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Alexander Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country’...
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State" (Stanford UP, 2024)
06 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees...
Sarah El-Kazaz, "Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul" (Duke UP, 2023)
15 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023), Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers i...
Alp Yenen and Erik-Jan Zürcher, "A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments" (Leiden UP, 2023)
05 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Republic of Turkey was founded a hundred years ago on 29 October 1923. Turkey holds a unique position between Europe and the Middle East. It conti...
Bedross Der Matossian, "The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
03 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bedross Der Matossian's The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2023), based on new ...
Noel Malcolm, "Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750" (Oxford UP, 2019)
03 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Pre...
Adam Mestyan, "Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Adam Mestyan (Duke Uni...
Ilkay Yilmaz, "Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
24 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press, 2023), İlkay Yılmaz reconsiders the history of two ...
Devrim Adam Yavuz, "Democracy and Capitalism in Turkey: The State, Power, and Big Business" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
23 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
While a positive correlation between capitalism and democracy has existed in Western Europe and North America, the example of late-industrializing nat...
Gregory J. Goalwin, "Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite theories to the contrary, religious nationalism, and the use of religion to determine membership in the national community, has continued to p...
Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation
02 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. T...
Bahriye Kemal, "Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space" (Routledge, 2021)
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Writin...
Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular, "The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina" (Stanford UP, 2023)
20 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her sparkling and splendid new book The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina (Stanford University Press, 2023),...
Valentina Marcella, "Laughing Matters: Graphic Satire Reckoning with the 1980 Coup in Turkey" (Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino, 2022)
12 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Valentina Marcella's Laughing Matters: Graphic Satire Reckoning with the 1980 Coup in Turkey (Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino 2022) focuses...
Gültan Kışanak, "The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison" (Pluto Press, 2022)
10 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022) is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from m...
Zeynep K. Korkman, "Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey" (Duke UP, 2023)
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (Duke UP, 2023), Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial for...
Timur Warner Hammond, "Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul" (U California Press, 2023)
27 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure bur...
Elyse Semerdjian, "Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide" (Stanford UP, 2023)
20 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body...
Anthony Gad Bigio, "A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic" (Hamilton Books, 2023)
17 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (Hamilton Books, 2023), Anthony Gad Bigio ...
Hans-Lukas Kieser, "When Democracy Died: The Middle East's Enduring Peace of Lausanne" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in Switzerland in July 1923, officially settled the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied forces. Not only...
Christopher Harrison, "Genocidal Conscription: Drafting Victims and Perpetrators Under the Guise of War" (Lexington Books, 2023)
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Harrison's book Genocidal Conscription: Drafting Victims and Perpetrators Under the Guise of War (Lexington Books, 2023) examines how s...
Simon Mills, "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760" (Oxford UP, 2020)
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Simon Mills' book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship Between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 (Oxford UP, 2020) tell...
Melis Hafez, "Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
04 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early...
Oyman Başaran, "Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey" (U Texas Press, 2023)
23 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gat...
Ilkim Büke Okyar, "Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
22 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The emergence of Turkish nationalism prior to World War I opened the way for various ethnic, religious, and cultural stereotypes to link the notion of...
Kaya Sahin, "Peerless Among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman" (Oxford UP, 2023)
29 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Süleyman, who ruled the Ottoman Empire between 1520 and 1566, was a globally recognized figure during his lifetime. In Peerless Among Princes: The ...
Nora Barakat, "Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire" (Stanford UP, 2023)
16 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 19th century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated int...
Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, "Nur Baba: A Sufi Novel of Late Ottoman Istanbul" (Routledge, 2023)
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This conversation is with Brett Wilson, who has composed the first English translation of the classic and controversial novel from late Ottoman Turkey...
Nora Barakat, "Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire" (Stanford UP, 2023)
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman statesmen sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated in...
Claudia Liebelt, "Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
14 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly c...
Gönül Tol, "Erdoğan's War: A Strongman's Struggle at Home and in Syria" (Oxford UP, 2023)
05 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's pugnacious president, is now the country's longest-serving leader. On his way to the top, he has fought many wars. Thi...
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009)
18 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-de...
Hilary Falb Kalisman, "Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2022)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, it is hard to imagine a time and place when public school teachers were considered among the elite strata of society. But in the lands controll...
Sarah M. Zaides, "Tevye's Ottoman Daughter: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews at the End of Empire" (Libra Kitap, 2022)
24 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In existing scholarship on Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire, there were three typical fates available to Russia's Jews on the eve of the Bolshevi...
Mostafa Minawi, "Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire" (Stanford UP, 2022)
23 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Mostafa Minawi's Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire (Stanford University Press, 2022) offers an intimate history of ...
Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, a...
Aaron Berman, "America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler" (Routledge, 2022)
13 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Aaron Berman's book America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler (Routledge, 2022) focuses in on the relationship ...
Eren Duzgun, "Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Revisiting Turkish Modernity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
28 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Western interpretations of the Ottoman age of reform and the Turkish Republic often evaluate these histories against an idealized, essentialized narra...
Andreas Guidi, "Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
22 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1912, Italy occupied Rhodes, an Ottoman town inhabited by Greek Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics. Rhodes became a territory of Italy's empire...
Muhammet Koçak, "Turkey-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Cooperation and Competition Amid Systemic Turbulence" (Lexington, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Turkey and Russia are two of the most significant powerhouses in Eurasia. The foreign policies of two countries directly impact the regional dynamics ...
Elise Massicard, "Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey" (Stanford UP, 2022)
04 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public...
Jonathan Wyrtzen, "Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East" (Columbia UP, 2022)
09 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally i...
Sevgi Adak, "Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic" (I. B. Tauris, 2022)
12 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The veiling and unveiling of women have been controversial issues in Turkey since the late-Ottoman period. It was with the advent of local campaigns a...
Helen Pfeifer, "Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands" (Princeton UP, 2022)
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the sixteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire has just defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, conquering Damascus and Cairo, important centers of Arab ...
Bedross Der Matossian, "The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century" (Stanford UP, 2022)
02 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1909, two waves of massacres shook the province of Adana, located in the southern Anatolia region of modern-day Turkey, killing more than 20,...
Amy E. Grubb and Elisabeth Hope Murray, "British Responses to Genocide: The British Foreign Office and Humanitarianism in the Ottoman Empire, 1918-1923" (Routledge, 2022)
02 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When I was an undergrad, the chronology of World War One was simple. The war began in August of 1914 and ended in November of 1918. Now, of course, ...
Eray Çayli, "Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2021)
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Confronting the past” has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised a...
The Future of Erdogan: A Discussion with Dimitar Bechev
05 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Reccep Tayyib Erdogan is towering politician. He has dominated Turkey for 20 years and is now being compared to Ataturk as a man who has changed the d...
Lauren K. Stokes, "Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany" (Oxford UP, 2022)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. ...
Chris Gratien, "The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier" (Stanford UP, 2022)
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I talk to Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, about his new book, The Unsettled Plain: A...
Amanda Phillips, "Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean" (U California Press, 2021)
27 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Textiles were the second-most-traded commodity in world history, preceded only by grain. In the Ottoman Empire, in particular, the sale and exchange o...
Louis Fishman, "Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland" (Edinburgh UP. 2021)
10 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Uncovering a history buried by different nationalist narratives (Jewish, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian) the book by Louis Fishman looks at how the lat...