Ottoman History Podcast

Episode 399 with Zeynep Çelik hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan and Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud How did the Ottomans react to European attitudes and depictions of their own lands? Pondering on the groundbreaking book 'Orientalism' by Edward Said forty years after its publication, our guest Zeynep Çelik discusses the ways in which urban, a...

Episode 398 with Şevket Pamuk hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud What forces have governed Turkey's economic growth over the past two centuries? In this episode we speak with Şevket Pamuk about development in Turkey since 1820. In the late Ottoman period, low barriers to trade, agrarian exports, and European financial control defined...

Episode 395 with Metin Atmaca hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Zones of autonomy and resistance make up the region historically called Kurdistan - areas that can include parts of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Armenia - depending on whom you ask. This region, whose territory spans the boundaries of nation-states created after the First...

Episode 391 with Stefano Taglia hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud The use of stimulants, what we now refer to as recreational drugs (marijuana and hashish – esrar and haşiş ), in the late Ottoman world constitutes a lens through which one can observe multiple aspects of both the history of the Ottoman Empire and its historiography in its bro...

Episode 386 with Suzy Hansen hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Turkey is a country that most Americans know little about, and yet the United States has played an extraordinary role in the making of modern Turkey. In this podcast, we explore this disparity of awareness and the role of the US in the history of the Middle East through the lens...

Episode 382 with Ohannes Kılıçdağı hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud The history of Ottoman Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire is inevitably in the shadow of 1915. In today’s episode, we explore new approaches to this history with Dr. Ohannes Kılıçdağı. We speak in particular about the hopes that the emp...

Episode 379 with Ahmet Ersoy & Deniz Türker hosted by Matthew Ghazarian and Zeinab Azarbadegan Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud How did the Ottomans come to visually represent their mythical origins? And to what ends? In this episode we speak with Ahmet Ersoy and Deniz Türker about the formation, development, and visualization of Ertuğrul sancak, the mythical birt...

Episode 378 with Özlem Gülin Dağoğlu hosted by Sam Dolbee and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Many myths have accompanied the life of Mihri Rasim, but few are as interesting as her life itself. Born to a wealthy family in Istanbul in the late Ottoman period, Mihri Rasim became a politically connected painter, living in Italy for several years on her...

Episode 369 with Jane Hathaway hosted by Sanja Kadrić and Emily Neumeier Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud For more than three centuries, a cadre of African eunuchs were responsible for guarding the Ottoman harem at the imperial palace in Istanbul. The head of this group, the Chief Harem Eunuch, emerged as an extremely influential individual at the court. This was...

Episode 367 with Salim Tamari hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Nationalism has greatly influenced the way we think about Palestinian history. In this episode, Salim Tamari discusses this question in relation to his new book, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine , which explores Palestine under Ottoman rule during World War I. Tamari hig...

Episode 363 with Lauren Davis hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud What did Istanbul's Spice Bazaar smell like in Ottoman times? In this episode, we explore the historical smellscape of this iconic market space from its early history up to the present day. Through a story about Ottoman smells and their transformations in the twentieth ce...

Episode 362 with M’hamed Oualdi & Hayri Gökşin Özkoray hosted by Andreas Guidi Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how slavery flourished in the Ottoman Mediterranean in the wake of growing connectivity with other world regions and territorial expansion. The discussion draws out the ambiguity bet...

Episode 359 with Zeynep Oktay Uslu hosted by Matthew Ghazarian and Işın Taylan Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud In this episode, we explore the evolution of Abdal and Bektashi doctrine from the 14th to 17th centuries. The Abdals of Rum and the Bektashis were two dervish groups in Anatolia who by the 16th century would merge to become the Bektashi Sufi order. Many...

Episode 357 with Didem Havlioğlu hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud What did it mean to be a woman in the intellectual world of early modern Islamic empires? In this episode, our guest Didem Havlioğlu offers one answer to this question through the life and works of Mihrî Hatun, an Ottoman woman from 15th-century Amasya whose poetry survives t...

Episode 354 with Natalie Rothman hosted by Nir Shafir and Aslihan Gürbüzel Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Dragomans are often known as diplomatic translators, but their responsibilities and roles went much further than being mere interpreters. In this podcast, we speak with Natalie Rothman about how dragomans negotiated both linguistic space and social space acr...

Episode 349 with Noémi Lévy-Aksu hosted by Taylan Güngör and Michael Talbot Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Idare-i örfiyye (or örfi idare ), loosely translated as a “state of emergency or siege,” was a neologism introduced in the first Ottoman constitution in 1876 to allow the suspension of ordinary legal order in Ottoman localities in case of actual or potentia...

Episode 348 with Alexander Bevilacqua hosted by Maryam Patton and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud When and how did European scholars first begin to seriously study Islam and the Arabic language? It has often been assumed that Medieval misconceptions and polemic towards Muslims were not cast off until the secularism of the European Enlightenment. In...

Episode 340 with Leslie Peirce hosted by Suzie Ferguson and Seçil Yılmaz Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud In this episode, we explore the life and times of Roxelana, also known as Hürrem Sultan, a slave girl who became chief consort and then legal wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (r. 1520-1566). We trace Roxelana's probable beginnings and the possible paths t...

Episode 339 with Aylin de Tapia hosted by Susanna Ferguson , Seçil Yilmaz and Ella Fratantuono Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud In this episode, we consider the story of the Tanzimat reforms from the perspective of rural Cappadocia, a region in central Anatolia now famous as a tourist destination. In the nineteenth century, Cappadocia was home not only to the Musl...

Episode 334 with Emrah Safa Gürkan hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Along with new maritime networks, information stiched together the empires of the early modern period. One component of the growing networks of information in the increasingly connected space of the Mediterranean world was espionage. As we learn in our latest conversation w...

Episode 331 with Ella Fratantuono hosted by Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Though it is often ignored among the many histories of the great migrations of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire experienced the arrival of millions of migrants over the course of its last decades. The migrant or muhacir was therefore not just a critical...

Episode 328 with Khaled El-Rouayheb hosted by Shireen Hamza and Abdul Latif Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud The seventeenth century, contrary to popular belief, was a time of great originality and change for scholars in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. In this interview, Khaled El-Rouayheb debunks the many myths of intellectual decline by showing how the intel...

Episode 327 with contributions by Zeynep Çelik, Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular, Özde Çeliktemel-Thomen, Mehmet Kentel, Michael Talbot, Murat Yıldız, Burçak Özlüdil Altın, Seçil Yılmaz, Burçin Çakır, Zeinab Azerbadegan, Dotan Halevy, Chris Gratien, and Michael Ferguson Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud Visual sources such as photographs, maps, and miniatures often serve as a...

Episode 323 with Erik-Jan Zürcher hosted by Andreas Guidi and Elif Becan Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud In this collaboration with The Southeast Passage , we discuss the emergence of the Turkish nationalist movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the establishment of a sovereign Republic of Turkey in 1923. As our guest Prof. Erik-Jan Zürcher n...

Episode 320 featuring Bruce Burnside & Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed  |  iTunes  |  GooglePlay  |  SoundCloud The distance between the shores of the Ottoman Empire and New York City may be great, but, as this episode suggests, a great many connections exist between these places, too. This episode explores both the everyday lives of those hailing from the Ottoman domains over several centuri...