Publications & Forthcoming Publications
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 82, No. 2 (October 2023): 271–2.
"This weighty volume, entitled An Ottoman Cosmography, represents the culmination of a decade-long collaborative effort to render Kātib Çelebi’s Ottoman Turkish Cihānnümā—one of the most influential Ottoman geographic works by perhaps the Empire’s best-known scholar—into English. It is, as Gottfried Hagen reminds us in his introduction, the first full translation of this important text into a western language, as well as the first English translation of any work by Kātib Çelebi since Geoffrey Lewis published his Mīzānü’l-ḥaḳḳ fī iḫtiyāri’l-aḥakk as The Balance of Truth in 1957."
Zemin No. 6 (2023): 242–247.
"Browsing the robust literature on the scholarly practices of early modern European orientalists, a reader could be forgiven for thinking that these scholars lacked all enthusiasm for learning Ottoman Turkish, the written language of the cultural and administrative elite of the empire that then controlled the core Islamic lands. Yet, almost inexplicably, sitting in any of the continent’s numerous manuscript libraries, the researcher confronts an enormous wealth of Ottoman manuscripts and reading aids. Nil Ö. Palabıyık’s Silent Teachers: Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in Early Modern Europe, 1544–1669 offers us the first steps out of this paradox, providing a sorely needed corrective to our existing understanding of the place of Ottoman Turkish in orientalist scholarship. Palabıyık takes aim at a literature which has portrayed these scholars as neglectful of Turkish, and the language as a “workaday tongue” that “would hardly feature … in their scholarly activities.” By shifting the focus from printed grammars and translations to copy-specific research, orientalists’ Turkish-language manuscripts, and the traces of their readings, Palabıyık demonstrates the importance that these early modern orientalists attributed to the study of Ottoman Turkish. In the process, Palabıyık reveals how scholars, in northern and western continental Europe, emulated the methods of their Ottoman counterparts, relying on Turkish commentaries, dictionaries, and other reading aids to explicate difficult Arabic and Persian texts."
Works in Progress
The Origins of an Ottoman Bourgeois Social Reformer: Recontextualizing Mustafa Suphi’s Early Thought‘You may not complaine in so bad a place you have spent your time in vaine:’ Towards a Microhistory of the 17th Century English Consul Thomas Potton
Syllabi
Academia.edu
This syllabus offers a critical homage, from the perspective of social history and history from below, to Marshall Hodgson's project of writing a "general history of Islamicate civilization," realized in his magisterial three-volume work, The Venture of Islam. It was developed as part of my preparations for a comprehensive doctoral exam in Islamicate History, and therefore reflects both my own idiosyncrasies and inexperience. It is by no means intended to constitute a comprehensive list of all published social histories of the Middle East and there are undoubtedly some unfortunate omissions, foremost among them Judith Tucker's Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt and Beshara Doumani's Rediscovering Palestine. My hope is that by making it available it might serve as a useful jumping off point for others.