CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Ideas, Authors and Circulation: Intellectual Production from the Early Modern Era to the 19th Century
The Ottoman-Persian-Arab Nexus
Postgraduate Workshop in Intellectual History and Methodology
14–17 April 2027 | Orient-Institut Istanbul
Application deadline: 8 January 2027
This three-day postgraduate workshop brings together MA and PhD researchers working on the intellectual history of the Ottoman, Persian, and Arab worlds from the early modern period to the nineteenth century.
The workshop explores how ideas, texts, and concepts were produced, interpreted, transmitted, translated, and mobilised across different historical settings. It also considers the material and social conditions of intellectual production, including manuscript culture, print and the press, authorship, intellectual mobility, and scholarly and political networks.
The programme combines lectures by invited scholars with student research presentations and methodological discussion. Selected participants will receive focused feedback on their sources, research questions, and analytical approaches.
We invite proposals engaging with questions such as:
- Ideas and concepts: How were concepts, political languages, and intellectual traditions interpreted, reformulated, contested, or mobilised in changing historical contexts?
- Texts and circulation: How did manuscripts, commentaries, translations, books, newspapers, and periodicals shape the production and transmission of knowledge?
- Authors and networks: How can intellectual biographies and individual trajectories be situated within scholarly, social, political, and trans-imperial networks?
- Methods and sources: How can intellectual and conceptual history be combined with the study of authorship, textual practices, materiality, mobility, and multilingual sources?
Proposals may focus on the Ottoman, Persian, or Arab intellectual worlds individually, or examine connections between them. Papers are not expected to cover the workshop’s full chronological or geographical scope, but should situate their case studies within its broader questions of intellectual production, concepts, circulation, and methodology.
Applications
Applicants should submit:
- Letter of motivation
- an abstract of up to 500 words, outlining the research question, primary sources, and methodological approach;
- a short academic CV of up to 2 pages.
Please send both documents as a single PDF to irem.erturk@ehess.fr by 8 January 2027.
Applications and presentations should be in English. Participants may, however, work with sources and conduct their research in German, French, Arabic, Turkish, or English.
Selected participants will take part in an online preparatory meeting before the workshop and will be asked to submit a draft paper in advance.
Limited financial support is available to cover travel and accommodation expenses for selected participants.