Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast New Books in Turkish Studies

When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship. In Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Sinem Arcak Casale sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts. Countless treasures—such as intricate carpets, gilded silver cups, and ivory-tusk knives—flowed from the Safavid to the Ottoman Empire throughout the sixteenth century. While only a handful now survive, records of these gifts exist in court chronicles, treasury records, poems, epistolary documents, ambassadorial reports, and travel narratives. Tracing this elaborate archive, Dr. Casale treats gifts as representative of the complicated Ottoman-Safavid coexistence, demonstrating how their rivalry was shaped as much by culture and aesthetics as it was by religious or military conflict. Gifts in the Age of Empire explores how gifts were no mere accessories to diplomacy but functioned as a mechanism of competitive interaction between these early modern Muslim courts. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Those of us who have some background in Jewish history are taught that the Ottoman Empire encouraged Jews, particularly those of the Spanish and Portuguese Expulsions, to settle in Ottoman Lands.  In Ottoman Jewry: Leadership, Charity, and Literacy (Brill, 2024), Professor Ayalon debunks what he calls that myth. The Ottomans, according to Yaron, were interested in stability - economic and otherwise. Minorities, with their additional taxes, would bring more financial benefits. Many were merchants who would pay higher taxes. With this premise, we discussed the world of the Ottoman Jews as one of creating community and society. There were Romaniot, Sephardim, Msta'ribun and some Ashkenazim who settled across these lands, and together they created strong communities with Rabbinic and lay leadership and a cultural heritage that can still be seen today in those communities who have survived and relocated around the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 public discourse, Gaza tends to be characterized solely as a theatre of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. However, little is known about Gaza's society, politics, economy, and culture during the Ottoman era. Drawing on a range of previously untapped local and imperial sources, Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow explore the city's history from the mid-nineteenth century through WWI.  In Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation (Cambridge UP, 2024), they show that Gaza's historical importance extends far beyond the territory of the 'strip' since the city was an important hub for people, goods, and ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity until the twentieth century. Using new digital methodologies, Ben-Bassat and Buessow introduce readers to the world of Gazans from various walks of life, from the traditional Muslim elites to the commoners and minority communities of Christians and Jews. In so doing, they tell the lively story of this significant but frequently misunderstood city. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates. Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Yanni Kotsonis, Professor of History and Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University, is the author of The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2025). This deeply researched and beautifully written history traces how something brand new – a Greek nation-state – emerged out of an Ottoman Balkan mosaic of languages, religions, and cultures. The book argues that the Greek Revolution was an event of global historical significance, ushering in an age of ethnocentric nationalism. In addition, Kotsonis' work is a major contribution to the studies of statecraft and mass violence, showcasing how new practices of mass mobilization and warfare transformed Ottomans into “Greeks” and their “Others.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence.  In her book The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (University of Cambridge Press, 2024), Dr. Zozan Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Rhodes blood libel of 1840, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, was initiated by the island’s governor in collusion with Levantine merchants, who charged the local Jewish community with murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. An episode in the shared histories of Ottomans and Jews, it was forgotten by the former and, even if remembered, misunderstood by the latter. The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era (Berghahn Books, 2024) aims to restore the place of this event in Sephardi and Ottoman history. Based on newly discovered Ottoman and Jewish sources it argues that the acquittal of Rhodian Jews is adequately understood only in the context of the Tanzimat and the Sublime Porte’s foreign relations. Contrary to the common view that Ottoman Jews did not experience the impact of the Tanzimat reforms until the mid-1850s, this study shows that their effects were felt as early as 1840. Furthermore, this book offers a window onto life and intercommunal relations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressions of identity collide and naming one's orientation is a fraught endeavor. An eleven-year-old undergoes hand surgery that will allow him to wear a wedding ring in adulthood. Two college roommates reach an erotic understanding as they indulge in dessert. A sex worker travels with an American same-sex marriage activist through the Aegean countryside. A passionate hookup during Istanbul Pride ends in tear gas. Two friends' tempers flare over cold red wine on a hot summer night by the Dardanelles. A father bonds with his son and his son's drag-queen boyfriend over classic Turkish cinema on the Mediterranean coast. In Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (UP of Kentucky, 2024), Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters—Hasan, Gökhan, Nazlı, and Cenk—who search for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place from the 1980s through the 2010s against the backdrop of Turkey's transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations of queer individuals and culture, and the emergence of affirming LGBTQ+ identities. Görkemli creates a complex, engaging network of plots about his characters' struggles and triumphs in navigating families, communities, and themselves. Braving discrimination, they strive to embrace their identities and find joy, solace, and approval within a society that marginalizes who they are and how they love. Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press; winner of the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Book Award presented by the Conference on College Composition and Communication). His creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Image; his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. He was a 2023-24 faculty fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, a contributor in fiction at the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fiction fellow at the 2018 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. Originally from Türkiye, he has a PhD in English from Purdue University and is an associate professor of English at UConn Stamford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intelligible? What are people doing in movements across the globe when they gather in public space and recount nightmares of their disappeared loved ones?  In Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2024), Ege Selin Islekel creates a South-South dialogue, connecting practices of forced disappearance in Latin America with those in Turkey and the movements of resistance developed by the searchers and remnants. By analyzing methods of power that target death and the afterlives of the dead, Islekel shows that the world is, but need not be, organized by such practices. She shows how people mobilize resistance within the death worlds of necrosovereignty, inventing possibilities from the very stuff of nightmares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia UP, 2024) examines political relations and literary translations between Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through to the 1960s. By drawing on a wide range of texts – from erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, to socialist realist novels and theatre – Ertürk argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution. A unique textual exploration, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture. Nergis Ertürk is Associate Professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (2011), which received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and editor of the Comparative Literature Studies journal. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

International development projects supported by governments of wealthy countries, international financial institutions, and influential NGOs like the Gates Foundation purport to uplift poor or disadvantaged populations through political, economic, and social interventions in these communities. However, practices, policies, and discourses of development also have a darker side: they are both premised on and perpetuate the translation of social difference into deficit, ranking groups according to their perceived ‘stage’ of historical development. My guest today, the political theorist Begüm Adalet, has explored how discourses and practices of development have interacted with political processes of racialization. She also examines how anti-colonial movements can resist racialized development practices by envisioning alternative means of recrafting built environments and the creation of selves. Our interview today focuses on three recent articles that she has published in academic journals: “Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 40, no. 6 (2022): 975-993 “Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon,” Political Theory vol. 50, no. 1 (2022): 5-31 “An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective,” American Political Science Review (2024) Begüm Adalet is assistant professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Hotels and Highways: The construction of modernization theory in Cold War Turkey (Stanford, 2018), which I interviewed her about for the New Books Network in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, and economic traffics from Tehran to just outside Damascus to the shrine of Sayyida Zainab’s tomb. Attending to questions of mobility and immobility of pilgrims and contraband across state borders, Zainab's Traffic unsettles our approaches to ziyarat (pilgrimages) by provoking the reader to dwell in matters of urban and spatial development, sectarian demarcations, flows of consumer goods (Syrian lingerie and Ceylon tea) and the seeking of spiritual blessings. Yildiz moves with various pilgrims, traders, and goods on buses on a nearly eight-hundred-mile journey. These stories of flow from his interlocutors based on extensive fieldwork experiences renders any easy framing of pilgrimage practices in Islamic parlance impossible and forces us to contain the multitudes of ever-changing reality of ritual and lived Islam set against fickle state borders and its sociality. This book will be a great resource to scholars of anthropology of Islam, especially those interested in methodology of fieldwork and writing ethnography, and scholars who think about pilgrimages, and the regions of Iran, Turkey, and Syria and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 (Norton, 2024)--the first major history of that arena in fifty years--the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record. Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order.  In contrast to this well-studied transformation, in Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024), Samuel Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics. As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism. Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked whether we have a republic or a monarchy. He replied “A Republic…if you can keep it.” In The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power (Stanford UP, 2021), David M. Driesen argues that Donald Trump's presidency challenged Americans to consider whether the Madisonian system of checks and balances could robustly respond to a president claiming extensive executive power and disregarding traditional processes such as the peaceful transition of power. Driesen notes that Benjamin Franklin and many men in the “founding” generation observed tyrannical government in Europe – and they explicitly included safeguards in the U.S. Constitution to prevent extensive executive power in the United States. In this tradition, Driesen analyzes the chief executive's role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. He argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to constitutional democracy. Driesen urges the U.S. to learn from the mistakes of these failing democracies. Specifically, he sees the United States Supreme Court as enabling the expansion of executive power. Specter of Dictatorship highlights how the Supreme Court’s reliance on and expansion of the legal approach called unitary executive theory threatens the separation of powers in the U.S. Driesen recommends a less deferential approach in which the judiciary checks the executive. The Supreme Court has been acting a if policing presidential power is the threat to democracy – but the real danger for constitutional democracy lies in expansion of executive power. For Driesen, judges and justices should give substantial weight to concerns about democratic erosion. Because autocracy is spreading abroad and presidential power is expanding in the US, Benjamin Franklin’s concern about maintaining democracy is relevant in 2024. Professor Driesen is the thirteenth University Professor at Syracuse University where he teaches constitutional and environmental law. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and has published several books and numerous articles with leading academic publishers and law reviews. From the podcast: David’s piece on major questions doctrine David’s editorial on the POTUS debate, Victor Orban, and Haitian Immigrants Correction from Susan – the two dissenters in Roe v. Wade were appointed by John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The justices voting in favor of reproductive rights were 5 men appointed by Republican presidents (Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon) and 2 men appointed by Democratic presidents (Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 story of how the First World War ended in the Middle East. Tracing Europe's war with the Ottoman Empire through to the signing of Lausanne, which finally ended the war in 1923, she places the decisive Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in sharp relief against the unrelenting war in the East and reassesses the military operations, humanitarian activities and diplomatic dealings that continued after the signing of Versailles in 1919.  She shows how, on the Middle Eastern Front, Britain and France directed Allied war strategy against a resurgent Ottoman Empire to sustain an imperial system that favored Europe's dominance within the nascent international system. The protracted nature of the conflict and ongoing humanitarian crisis proved devastating for the civilian populations caught in its wake and increasingly questioned old certainties about a European-led imperial order and humanitarian intervention. Its consequences would transform the postwar world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs.  Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines four cases that illuminate why perpetrators have destroyed populations using displacement policies: Germany’s genocide of the Herero (1904–1908); Ottoman genocides of Christian minorities (1914–1925); expulsions of Germans from East/Central Europe (1943–1952); and climate violence (twenty-first century). Because displacement has been typically framed as a secondary aspect of mass atrocities, existing scholarship overlooks how perpetrators use it as a means of executing destruction rather than a vehicle for moving people to a specific location to commit atrocities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 story of how the Allied force successfully evacuated in the middle of winter under the guns of the Turkish defenders. Our guest for this episode of New Books in Military History is an expert on the Gallipoli campaign, retired chief oral historian of the Imperial War Museum in London, U.K., Peter Hart. In a rollicking and engaging interview with host Bobby WIntermute, Peter discusses his most recent book, The Gallipoli Evacuation (Living History, 2020), the oral historian's craft, and the overall conditions faced by British, ANZAC, French, and Turkish troops in the waning months of the campaign.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 2010s, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) began to mobilize an international media system to project Turkey as a rising player and counter foreign criticism of its authoritarian practices. In Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Bilge Yesil examines the AKP’s English-language communication apparatus, focusing on its objectives and outcomes, the idea-generating framework that undergirds it, and the implications of its activities. She also analyzes the decolonial and pan-Islamist messages AKP-sponsored outlets deploy to position Turkey as a burgeoning great power opposed to imperialism and claiming to be the voice of oppressed Muslims around the world. As the AKP wields this rhetoric to further its geopolitical and economic goals, media outlets pursue their own objectives by obfuscating facts with identity politics, demonizing the West to aggrandize the East and rallying Muslims under Turkey’s purportedly benevolent leadership. Insightfully exploring the crossroads of communications and authoritarianism, Talking Back to the West illuminates how the Erdogan government and its media allies use history, religion, and identity to pursue complementary agendas and tighten the AKP’s grip on power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-author history of the eastern Roman empire to appear in over a generation. Covering political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, demography, and economy, Anthony Kaldellis's volume is divided into ten chronological sections which begin with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and end with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century. The book incorporates new findings, explains recent interpretive models, and presents well-known historical characters and events in a new light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives become sites of other kinds of stories—some of solidarity, activism, and the commons. Çelikaslan uses the concept of archives of the commons reimagining archives as dynamic spaces of commoning in which creative, autonomous platforms are generated collectively to perpetuate knowledge and sociopolitical relations grounded in solidarity and an ethics of care, not in some distant future but in the here and now. Özge Çelikaslan is a scholar and practitioner whose research interests encompass media historiography, critical audiovisual archival studies, and research-based film/video practices. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An interview with renowned calligrapher and author Razwan ul-Haq talking about his graphic novel Sultan vs. Dracula (al-Oblong Books, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I talk to Samuel Dolbee, Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His book, Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this highly original environmental history, Samuel Dolbee sheds new light on borders and state formation by following locusts and revealing how they shaped both the environment and people's imaginations from the late Ottoman Empire to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Dolbee details environmental, political, and spatial transformations in the region's history by tracing the movements of locusts and their intimate relationship to people in motion, including Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees, as well as states of the region. With locusts and moving people at center stage, surprising continuities and ruptures appear in the Jazira, the borderlands of today's Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Transcending approaches focused on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire or the creation of nation states, Dolbee provides a new perspective on the modern Middle East grounded in environmental change, state violence, and popular resistance. Deren Ertas is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority. But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital. This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story. Eugene Rogan is author of the bestselling The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920. He is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford and Director of the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke UP, 2024), Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context. Aslı Zengin is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Alize Arıcan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York (CUNY). Her work has been featured in Environment and Planning D, Current Anthropology, and City & Society, among other journals and public-facing platforms. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and 'Medz Yeghern' (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores the genealogy of the concept of 'Medz Yeghern' ('Great Crime'), the Armenian term for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian ethno-religious group in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1915-1923.  Widely accepted by historians as one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, ascribing the right definition to the crime has been a source of contention and controversy in international politics. Vartan Matiossian here draws upon extensive research based on Armenian sources, neglected in much of the current historiography, as well as other European languages in order to trace the development of the concepts pertaining to mass killing and genocide of Armenians from the ancient to the modern periods. Beginning with an analysis of the term itself, he shows how the politics of its use evolved as Armenians struggled for international recognition of the crime after 1945, in the face of Turkish protest. Taking a combined historical, philological, literary and political perspective, the book is an insightful exploration of the politics of naming a catastrophic historical event, and the competitive nature of national collective memories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey (Brill, 2023) offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialization through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s. This book is available open access here.  Görkem Akgöz is is a post-doc researcher at Humboldt University and a lecturer at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024) tell this story. The book reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala. Dr. Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Dr. Subrahmanyam himself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Alexander Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country’s history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future in his book To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul (Pegasus Books, 2024). Caught between two seas and two continents, Istanbul lies at the centre of the most pressing challenges of our time. With environmental decay, rapacious development and tightening authoritarianism straining its social fabric to breaking point, it represents the precipitous moment civilizations around the world are currently facing. In and around its crumbling Byzantine-era fortifications, Alexander Christie-Miller meets people who are experiencing the looming crisis and fighting back, sometimes triumphing despite the odds. To the City seamlessly blends two narratives: the story of Turkey’s tumultuous recent past told through the lives of those who live around the walls, and the story of Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II’s siege and capture of the city in 1453. That event still looms large in Turkey, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like a latter-day sultan invokes its memory as part of his effort to transform the country in an echo of its imperial past. This is a meditation on the soul of Istanbul, a paean to its resilience and fortitude. Walk with Christie-Miller and see the danger, beauty and hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford UP, 2024) reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities. Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include: critical political economy, urbanism, infrastructure and digital politics, and her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following “Cloud” technologies across the Global South. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including: Comparative Studies in Society and History, and City and Society. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 continues to captivate international attention, evoking hopes and fears in the hearts and minds of contemporary observers. As a critical commemoration of its centenary, A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments (Leiden University Press, 2023) presents a mosaic of one hundred carefully curated fragments by expert authors, shedding light on politics, economy, society, culture, gender, and arts in a hundred years of Turkey. Each fragment offers a glimpse into a specific aspect of Turkey’s development, revealing the complexities of Turkey’s historical reality. Through exhibiting a diverse range of historical sources like laws, speeches, essays, letters, newspaper articles, poems, songs, memoirs, photos, posters, maps, and diagrams, each fragment brings the voices and images of Turkey’s past and present to readers. This book is an invaluable resource for researchers, educators, students, and anyone interested in Turkey’s fascinating history since 1923. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bedross Der Matossian's The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2023), based on new research, sheds light on the history of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party, a major Armenian revolutionary party that operated in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Persia and throughout the global Armenian diaspora. Divided into sections which cover the origins, ideology, and regional history of the SDHP, the book situates the history of the Hnchaks within debates around socialism, populism, and nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The SDHP was not only an Armenian party but had a global Marxist outlook, and scholars in this volume bring to bear expertise in a wide range of histories and languages including Russian, Turkish, Persian and Latin American to trace the emergence and role this influential party played from their split with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the events of the Armenian genocide to the formation of the first Armenian Republic and then Soviet Armenia. Putting the Hnchaks in context as one of many nationalist radical groups to emerge in Eurasia in the late 19th century, the book is an important contribution to Armenian historiography as well as that of transnational revolutionary movements in general. Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter between two civilizational complexes and exposes the dynamic role that the Ottomans played in intra-European political and cultural struggles. Useful Enemies contends that ideas about the Ottomans were active ingredients in European thought, and were used to “shake things up, to provoke, to shame, to galvanise.” Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics - power, religion, society, and war. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which significantly contributed to the development of Western political thought. Sir Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. His main research interests are in British and European early modern history. Sir Noel is one of the foremost scholars of Thomas Hobbes. His other interests concern Western knowledge of the Ottoman empire and Balkan history. Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2023), Adam Mestyan (Duke University) argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism. Rather, they spurred from the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–WWI Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. The polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority.  Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on hitherto unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan also considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. Modern Arab Kingship's innovative analysis underscores how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press, 2023), İlkay Yılmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries. Taking up these new policies on surveillance, mobility, and control, Ottoman Passports offers a timely look at the origins of contemporary immigration debates and the historical development of discrimination, terrorism, and counterterrorism. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While a positive correlation between capitalism and democracy has existed in Western Europe and North America, the example of late-industrializing nations such as Turkey has demonstrated that the two need not always go hand in hand, and sometimes the interests of business coincide more firmly with anti-democratic forces.  In Democracy and Capitalism in Turkey: The State, Power, and Big Business (Bloomsbury, 2023), Devrim Adam Yavuz explores the factors that compelled capitalists in Turkey to adopt a more pro-democratic ideology by examining a leading Turkish business lobby (TÜSIAD) which has been pushing for democratic reform since the 1990s, despite representing some of the largest corporation owners in Turkey and having supported the state's authoritarian tendencies in the past such as the military coup of 1980. Drawing on roughly 70 interviews with influential members of TÜSIAD and individuals close to them, the book reveals that business leaders were willing to break away from the state due to the conflict between their evolving economic needs and power with a political elite and state that were unwilling to cater to their demands. In so doing, the book provides a rich account of business-state relations in Turkey as well as providing a case study for the wider study of democracy and capitalism in developing nations. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite theories to the contrary, religious nationalism, and the use of religion to determine membership in the national community, has continued to play a role in processes of identification in societies all around the globe ... and such processes seems likely to continue to structure the ways in which communities view themselves even in today’s globalized and seemingly secularized world. – Gregory Goalwin, Borders of Belief: Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey (Rutgers UP, 2022) Religion and nationalism are two of the most powerful forces in the world. And as powerful as they are separately, humans throughout history have fused religious beliefs and nationalist politics to develop religious nationalism, which uses religious identity to define membership in the national community. But why and how have modern nationalists built religious identity as the foundational signifier of national identity in what sociologists have predicted would be a more secular world? This book takes two cases - nationalism in both Ireland and Turkey in the 20th century - as a foundation to advance a new theory of religious nationalism. By comparing cases, Goalwin emphasizes how modern political actors deploy religious identity as a boundary that differentiates national groups. This theory argues that religious nationalism is not a knee-jerk reaction to secular modernization, but a powerful movement developed as a tool that forges new and independent national identities. "In an age where religious nationalisms and populisms are on the rise, Goalwin's comparative-historical work is a welcome contribution for comprehending how religious identities and politics interact. A valuable source for social scientists as well as non-specialists who are interested in this complex phenomenon." – Efe Peker, co-author, Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park: From Private Discontent to Collective Action Gregory Goalwin is an assistant professor of sociology at Aurora University in Illinois. His research has been published in journals including Social Science History, Patterns of Prejudice, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Nationalities Papers, and the Journal of Historical Sociology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples—the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths—all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world.  Professor Kenneth W. Harl’s newest book Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2023) vividly re-creates the lives and world of these often-forgotten peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Their brutal struggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever ready to learn from their more advanced neighbors. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over fifteen hundred years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space (Routledge, 2021) explores Anglophone, Hellenophone and Turkophone writings from the 1920s to the present. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan's humanistic geography and Henri Lefebvre's Marxist philosophy, Kemal proposes a new interdisciplinary spatial model, at once theoretical and empirical, that demonstrates the power of space and place in postcolonial partition cases. The book shows the ways that place and space determine identity so as to create identifications; together these places, spaces and identifications are always in production. In analysing practices of writing, inventing, experiencing, reading, and construction, the book offers a distinct 'solidarity' that captures the 'truth of space' and place for the production of multiple-mutable Cypruses shaped by and for multiple-mutable selves, ending in a 'differential' Cyprus, Mediterranean, and world. Writing Cyprus offers not only a nuanced understanding of the actual and active production of colonialism, postcolonialism and partition that dismantles the dominant binary legacy of historical-political deadlock discourse, but a fruitful model for understanding other sites of conflict and division Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her sparkling and splendid new book The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina (Stanford University Press, 2023), Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular presents a thorough and deeply layered account of the relationship between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and Muslims of Bosnia Herzegovina leading to and beyond the Berlin Treaty of 1878. At the heart of Erdogdular’s project is an argument for taking seriously the significant continuities in the relationship between Ottoman imperial rule and the religious and political lives of Bosnian Muslims. This meticulously researched and beautifully written book makes a compelling and convincing case for disrupting the popular opinion that locates the beginning of modernity in Bosnia Herzegovina with the onset of Habsburg rule. It does so by showing the complex and fascinating histories and discourses on such critical questions as migration (hijra), the encounter of Islam and modernity, education, and the nation that highlight the important role and place of Bosnian Muslim intellectuals and other actors to this story. This outstanding book is a landmark publication in the study of Islam and Muslim societies that provides a critically significant avenue of learning about a region and history often missed in dominant historiographies. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Valentina Marcella's Laughing Matters: Graphic Satire Reckoning with the 1980 Coup in Turkey (Istituto per l’Oriente C. A. Nallino 2022) focuses on the production of political cartoons in Turkey in the context of authoritarianism and repression that was brought about by the coup d’état of September 12 1980, and by the military rule that followed. It builds on theories of political satire as an active element of political culture. Political cartoons serve as the lens through which the evolution of the political space under the regime is explored. The analysis revolves around Gırgır, the satirical magazine that in the decade prior to the coup had already contributed to the emergence of a socially and politically critical field with its politically engaged columns and illustrations and that, during the regime, became the best-selling weekly at a national level. Two main issues are investigated. On the one hand, how Gırgır’s satire survived under a regime that, in its attempt to turn citizens into a homogeneous, uniform, and apolitical society, came to repress any possibility of criticism. On the other hand, how an alternative political response was elaborated through the cartoons by civil society and intellectuals in reaction to authoritarianism. Overall, the book contributes to the study of the military regime of the early 1980s, of satire in Turkey, of censorship, and of the strategies of dissent in authoritarian regimes. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, and the ways in which Turkey's anti-capitalist and socialist movements closely informed their political stances and practices. Demonstrating Kurdish women's ceaseless political determination and refusal to be silenced - even when behind bars - the book ultimately hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance. Gültan Kışanak is a longtime journalist, politician and anticolonial feminist activist for Kurdish liberation, who was elected to Parliament in 2007 as the MP from Diyarbakır. In 2016 she was arrested and charged with 'being a member of an armed illegal organization', for which she was sentenced to over 14 years imprisonment. Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (Duke UP, 2023), Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a form of affective labor through which its participants build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears. Korkman uses feeling—which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process—as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability in Turkey. In so doing, Korkman foregrounds “feeling” as a feminist lens to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures. Zeynep K. Korkman is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad.  In Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul (University of California Press, 2023), Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford UP, 2023), these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and-in what remains of those lives a century afterward-bones. With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dis-membered, disfigured, and later re-membered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (Hamilton Books, 2023), Anthony Gad Bigio explores the life of Gad Franco (1881–1954), a prominent Sephardi journalist, then a lawyer and a jurist, who worked relentlessly for the Jewish community’s belonging to the national Turkish polity, and for the consolidation of the rule of law. This historical biography, written by his grandson, takes the reader from fin-de-siècle Izmir, to the Istanbul of the Roaring Twenties and beyond, tracing his footsteps, including his opposition to Zionism, which he considered a threat to assimilation. The world of Sephardi Jewry, the convulsions and conflicts of the late Ottoman Empire, and the birth, ruthless consolidation, and promising reforms of the young Turkish Republic, provide the context to his intriguing life story. Inflamed by ethno-nationalism, the harassment of minorities deepened in the 1930s, peaking during World War II. By then a wealthy, respected Jewish community spokesperson and staunch Kemalist, Gad Franco was dealt an exemplary punishment in a shocking campaign to Turkify the economy, imposed on all minorities. His dramatic downfall at the hands of the Government shook his beliefs to the core. As their belonging to the nation had been so brutally denied, half of Turkish Jews migrated to Israel in the 1950s, putting an end to Gad Franco’s lifelong hopes of integration and acceptance. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in Switzerland in July 1923, officially settled the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied forces. Not only did the Treaty establish the borders of the modern Turkish republic, but it also defined boundaries, political systems, and understandings of citizenship in the newly formed post-Ottoman nation-states. In When Democracy Died: The Middle East's Enduring Peace of Lausanne (Cambridge UP, 2023), Hans-Lukas Kieser recounts how the eight dramatic months of the Lausanne Conference concluded more than ten years of war and genocide in the late Ottoman Empire. Crucially, the Treaty was in favour of a homogeneous Turkish state in Asia Minor and became the basis for the compulsory 'unmixing of people' that facilitated the persecution of minority groups, including Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs. Not only did this significant yet oft-overlooked treaty mark the end of the League of Nations' project of self-determination and security for small peoples, but it was crucial in shaping the modern Middle East, and dictatorships in Turkey and Europe. Hans-Lukas Kieser is also the author of Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton UP, 2018) Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Harrison's book Genocidal Conscription: Drafting Victims and Perpetrators Under the Guise of War (Lexington Books, 2023) examines how some states have employed mandatory military service as a tool to capture and kill the victims of genocide by recruiting the perpetrators from other minorities, and shifting blame away from the state. The book highlights several unique intersections that connect military history, Holocaust studies, and genocide. The study details an original framework that encompasses intentions and outcomes of wartime casualties, Clausewitzian wastage, and genocidal massacres. Christopher Harrison traces and compares how two genocidal regimes at war – the Ottoman Empire during World War One and Axis-era Hungary in World War Two – implemented certain policies of military service to capture and destroy their targets amidst the carnage of modern warfare.  Following this historical comparative study, the author then summarizes relevant implications and ongoing concerns. The conclusion includes insights into conscription by contemporary authoritarian regimes. By examining these histories and crises, the book suggests that several states are at risk of carrying out genocidal conscription today. While difficult and unlikely, due to political disincentives, the implication of this analysis considers reforms which may prevent states from repeating similar policies and actions again. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices