About
PhD Program - Middle East Studies: Turkish Studies
My research interests primarily lie in "the history of Islamic paideia", namely adab, with particular focus on pre-modern Ottoman context. To be more precise, I'm interested in the adib (cultivated man, gentleman-scholar) identity and the adab legacy of the societies of learned men, scholars (ulama), jurists, scribes, sufis and other members of upper classes. My research primarily investigates the literature in Ottoman, but due to pre-modern Islamic cosmopolitanism, the shared literary canon between pre-modern societies of Muslims, I'm also concerned with the intellectual networks between the Islamic empires, especially between Ottomans and Mamluks, in order to understand in which ways these connections played a role in conveying the norms of adab and motivating the formation of the elite identity.
Research Interests:
- Cultural and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the 14-16th centuries
- Literary discourses of historical societies of Muslims
- Islamic ways of knowledge: 'Ilm, Adab and Sufi knowledge
- Islamic encyclopedism
- Eloquence as an Adab norm and the theory and the practice of eloquent writing: Münşeats, Dictionaries, Meta-Texts (Mukaddime, Dibace etc.)
- Ottoman Tazkirah tradition
- Translations in the Ottoman manuscript culture
