with Uğur Z. Peçe hosted by Sam Dolbee | 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 k...
Dec 29, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Susanna Ferguson hosted by Chris Gratien | 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 Labors of Love: Gender, Capitalism, and Democracy in Modern Arab Thought . Previous scholarship has focused on the role of women in discussing the roles of women, but as Prof. Ferguson argues, women...
Sep 30, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Peter Hill hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | 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 ...
Sep 16, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with İlkay Yılmaz hosted by Sam Dolbee | 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 abi...
Sep 05, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky hosted by Chris Gratien & Can Gümüş | 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 R...
Aug 29, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Ali Kulez hosted by Sam Dolbee | 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 ...
Apr 11, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Andrew Simon, Alia Mossallam, and Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | 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 " The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt ," 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 e...
Apr 01, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Leena Dallasheh hosted by Chris Gratien | 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 cul...
Mar 24, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast Şeyma Afacan Sunucu: Can Gümüş | 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” ol...
Mar 10, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Ümit Kurt hosted by Sam Dolbee | 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 da...
Feb 26, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | 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 " The Sound of Revolution in M...
Feb 05, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Brett Wilson hosted by Brittany White | Set between elite households and a Sufi lodge, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's 1922 novel Nur Baba 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, ...
Jan 25, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Maha Nassar hosted by Susanna Ferguson | 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...
Jan 08, 2024•Transcript available on Metacast with Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | 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 " The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt ," 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. To...
Dec 20, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Avner Wishnitzer hosted by Sam Dolbee | What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark (also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as Gece Çökerken ). 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 And...
Dec 12, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Kyle Anderson & Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | 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 " The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt ," we consider how the First World War reshaped political consciousness in Egypt, as our guests Kyle And...
Dec 03, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Jessica Marglin hosted by Brittany White | 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, The Shamama Case , that marshals an impressive arra...
Nov 27, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Rashid Khalidi hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | In this episode, Rashid Khalidi discusses his latest book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 , 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 p...
Nov 19, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast Jesse Howell hosted by Sam Dolbee | In this episode, Jesse Howell discusses the history of the early modern caravan route between Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and Istanbul. In attending to the long-distance connections between the early modern Ottoman state and the Mediterranean world, he reveals the multi-ethnic communities that came together on the caravan route, the ways that Ottoman state established infrastructure to support mobility and circulation along these pathways, and the material a...
Oct 11, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Lucia Carminati hosted by Susanna Ferguson | The Suez Canal was one of the largest infrastructure projects in the late Ottoman world. Built to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the canal construction's lasted from 1858-1869 and mobilized tens of thousands of workers from across Egypt and the broader Mediterreanan. Those workers' lives and labor transformed the canal zone and Egypt at large, and their stories, travels, pleasures, and challenges reveal the networks that knit t...
Sep 28, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Nilay Özok-Gündoğan hosted by Sam Dolbee | 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. Writin...
Sep 20, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast Aslıhan Gürbüzel Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde, Doç. Dr. Aslıhan Gürbüzel’in bu sene başında University of California Press’ten çıkan kitabı “Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600–1700” başlıklı kitabı temelinde Osmanlı’da kamusal siyasetin oluşumunu tartışıyoruz. Kitap, Osmanlı’da devlet inşası sürecinin bir parçası olarak devletin artan merkezî gücüne, genişleyen bir kamusal siyasetin eşlik ettiğine işaret ediyor; erken modern dönemin aktif yurttaş oluş...
Sep 12, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast Samuel Dolbee hosted by Chris Gratien and Reem Bailony | 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 Turk...
May 31, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Chloe Bordewich and Lydia Harrington hosted by Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian | a collaboration with Harvard Islamica --- In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and...
May 30, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Nicholas Morton hosted by Maryam Patton | The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history, yet its influence on the social and political history of the realms that came under its domain is often minimized due to its short-lived nature. In some ways, the most lasting effects of the Mongol invasions were the unexpected geopolitical shakeups that their arrival brought. Notable examples included the increase in the slave trade which facilitated the rise of the Mamluk sultana...
May 26, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Ayşe Zarakol hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | 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 internati...
May 20, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Elizabeth Graver hosted by Brittany White | 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 event...
May 13, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Chloe Bordewich hosted by Maryam Patton | In times of conflict, state governments can be especially sensitive about protecting secrets. When new technologies are involved, like the telegraph, confusion over how exactly it functions and whether it is secure invite new debates over the nature of knowledge and what the public has the right to know. In this episode, Chloe Bordewich discusses her research about news, leaks, and propaganda in modern Egypt. By highlighting a particular court case ...
May 06, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast Linda Darling hosted by Sam Dolbee | 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 t...
Apr 05, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast with Mostafa Minawi hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | 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...
Mar 28, 2023•Transcript available on Metacast 
