This dissertation examines a discourse of Japanese images constructed in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish primary literature at the turn of the twentieth century in order to discern the prevailing understanding of "Eastern" modernity among members of Ottoman society in one particular …
This dissertation studies the use of legal institutions provided by the Islamic state in the resolution of intracommunal disputes and in the registration of legal transactions among Christians and Jews in late seventeenth century Istanbul. While being the capital city of an Isla…
This dissertation aims at establishing the interplay between disease and empire in the historical example of the early modern Ottoman Empire of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also aspires to reconstruct a historical narrative of plague outbreaks in the Ottoman lands b…
Along with Edirne in Thrace (Turkish Trakya), the city of Bursa was one of two focal points of Ottoman architectural patronage prior to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The last Ottoman sultan to build a külliye or piously endowed complex of buildings meant for public use…
This dissertation is about a person and a community in perpetual transition. It seeks to present a new historical perspective of a highly influential Jewish messianic Sabbatian movement that surfaced in the Ottoman Empire in 1665. The movement emerged within the matrix of early …
Conventionally, the era that begins after the death of celebrated Ottoman sultan Süleyman I in 1566 is seen as the beginning of Ottoman decline. In line with the decline paradigm, late sixteenth century is also accepted as a time of political turmoil. This period is characterize…
This study examined marginalia and colophons in South Slavic manuscripts to establish their value as primary historical source documents. The evidence of a "history from below" was compared with other primary sources to provide an understanding about the lives of Bulgarian Chris…
Through the evidence of the court records (sijill s), this dissertation examines the interplay between Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh ), codified sultanic law (qanun ) and customary law in the shari`a courts of Ottoman-Cairo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The thesis fo…
My dissertation project explores the discourse and practices of Ottoman rule between 1872 and 1919 in geographical Yemen. Drawing on a broad range of archival and published sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English such as government papers, travelogues, local petitions an…
Nurbanu (1525-1583) was a prominent figure in Ottoman society and a great patron of imperial projects of charity, yet her record has not been studied in depth. This study concentrates on the Atik Valide Mosque Complex, which constitutes the architectural embodiment of Nurbanu's …
This dissertation does not aim to tell a legend in the 'tulip age' but to assert that the tulip age itself is a legend. It is a historian's response to a historiographical invention. The main thesis of the dissertation is that the tulip age is not an appropriate conception of 17…
This dissertation explores the political re-ordering of the Ottoman Balkans during the nineteenth century by investigating the emergence of the South Slavic national movements and the remaking of the Ottoman imperial structures in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1840 to 1875. This i…
This dissertation will focus on a unique album (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Mixtus 313) created in the sixteenth-century for one of the greatest Ottoman bibliophiles, Sultan Murad III (r. 1574-95). The album includes miniature paintings and figural drawings…
My aim in this dissertation is to use the Ottoman discourse of the circle of justice as a wedge in an otherwise crippling debate that presumes a post sixteenth-century decline in the ability of the Ottoman empire to control and direct state affairs. While most scholars in the fi…
The number of cartographical depictions and narratives of different geographical regions increased in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This dissertation seeks to understand these new visual and textual narratives within the broader context of the political and intellectual …
This dissertation examines the relationship between women and property during the last phase of Ottoman rule in Greece and the early decades of the independent modern Greek Kingdom. It focuses on four locales that would be part of the Greek state from the beginning, each distinc…
My dissertation "The Lawgiver and His Lawmaker: The Role of Legal Discourse in the Change of Ottoman Imperial Culture" explores a selection of legal documents and treatises authored by Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566) and the most prominent jurist in his time:…
The complex interaction of historical forces that include the evolution of state institutions, global market consolidation, imperial expansion and the rise of a new diplomatic order has often been represented as a reflection of dichotomous social, economic and political factors.…
The purpose of this study is to re-examine the controversial Ottoman child levy, or devsirme, applied primarily amongst Christian populations in the Ottoman Balkans. Typically subsumed within the broader discussion of Ottoman state-building and centralization, the devsirme has b…