Current Project
Fools, Poets and Misfits: Critique and Marginalization in the early-modern Ottoman Empire
This monograph explores the transformations in Ottoman political culture and society from the later reign of Süleyman I to the assassination of İbrahim I in the mid-seventeenth century. It examines political and social commentaries that circulated outside imperial circles, drawing on both archival and narrative sources. By foregrounding subaltern and subversive voices, the book reveals the contours of early modern Ottoman dissent and a broader culture of critique, offering new insights into the dynamics of power, legitimacy, and opposition in the empire.
Selected Presentations
“Between Truth-Making and Authority-Breaking: Epistemic Hegemonies and Collaborations on Local to Global Scales.” Max Weber Postdoctoral Programme Conference, European University Institute, Florence, June 2025.
“Behind the Veil? Early Modern Ottoman Poetesses and What They Had to Say About State and Society.” Writing Women, Making History: Literature and the Study of Women’s Past Lives, organized by the Queer and Feminist Studies Working Group and Public History Working Group, Department of History, European University Institute, Florence, March 2024.
“Genre-Speficity and Cross-Referencing in Nevʿizāde ʿAṭāʾī’s Ḥadāʾiḳu’l-ḥaḳāʾiḳ and Ḫamse.” Texts as Living Objects: Reconsidering Dhayls as a Means for the Study of Authorship and Knowledge Transmission in the Manuscript Age, Paris, November 2023.
“Beyond Officialdom and Patronage: Alternative Careers and Self-Fashioning among the Ottoman Educated Elites during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 56th Annual Meeting, Denver (CO), November 2022.
“Marginality or ‘Eigensinn’? On the Social Function of the Holy Fools and Village Idiots in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire.” The Early Modern and Mediterranean Worlds Workshop (1200-1800), University of Chicago, October 2022.
“Meryem with the Hanging Hat on the Run: Female Crime in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire as a Subversive Identity Statement.” The Making and Unmaking of Identities in the Early Modern Mediterranean. European University Institute, Florence, May 2022.
“Tımariots, raider lords and other disgruntled soldiers: Social critique in the military-administrative branch of the Ottoman Empire between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries.” 3rd Mid-Atlantic Ottomanists Workshop (MAOW). University of Mary Washington, April 2022.
“‘Do I want to fit in?’: A Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Jurist’s Search for Alternatives During a Time of Crisis.” Northwestern University Graduate Conference “The End of the World as They Knew It: Crisis and Collapse in History”, May 2021.
“Idiosyncratic Forms of Social Criticism in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire”. Forschungskolloquium am Orient-Institut, Istanbul, April 2020.
