E593 | The jewel-encrusted musket of Mahmud I is one of the most popular pieces at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In this episode, curator Ashley Dimmig joins us to discuss her experience curating Islamic art and the manifold mysteries of the ornate 18th-century gun once owned by an Ottoman Sultan. These mysteries include practical questions about its design and the contents of its secret compartments as well as more conceptual puzzles about past provenance and effective presentation of Ottoman artifacts to international audience in an American city. In addition to discussing the fascinating history of the gun, Dr. Dimmig reflects on the exciting challenge of curating connections that allow every museum visitor to find an entry point into an exhibit.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/dimmig.html

Ashley Dimmig has served as the Crossman Gallery Director at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater since 2022, where, in addition to overseeing all operations of the Crossman Gallery and its permanent art collection, she teaches art history in the Department of Art and Design. After completing her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Michigan (2019), she worked as the Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Abbey Stockstill is Associate Professor and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair of Architectural History at UVA. Her book, Marrakesh & the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghreb, traces the development of Marrakesh in the twelfth century as a new kind of metropolis in the Islamic west, bridging multivalent identities through a sensitive manipulation of the surrounding environment.

Musa Kazım Azimli is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, specializing in slavery, social history, and digital humanities in the early modern and modern Middle East, with a focus on the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean. His dissertation, supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, reconstructs the history, spatial organization, and social legacies of Istanbul’s Imperial Slave Market through interdisciplinary methods drawn from spatial, socio-legal, cultural, architectural, and digital history.

CREDITS

Episode No. 593

Release Date: 28 August 2026

Recording Location: University of Virginia

Sound production by Chris Gratien

Music: kara güneş - İstanbul

Bibliography and images courtesy of Ashley Dimmig at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/dimmig.html

E592 | The First World War brought an end to six centuries of Ottoman imperial rule and in many ways, made the Middle East region as it is known today. In this episode recorded live at the University of Virginia Institute for the Arts and Humanities, we are joined by Mustafa Aksakal, author of two books about the Ottoman Empire's involvement in WWI. In his new book The War That Made the Middle East, Prof. Aksakal takes a fresh look at the fateful decisions of the empire's last days, as well as how the First World War transformed Ottoman society and politics with devastating consequences for the people who lived it and lasting implications for the future Middle East region.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/08/aksakal.html

Mustafa Aksakal is Associate Professor of History and the Nesuhi Ertegün Chair of Modern Turkish Studies at Georgetown University. He teaches courses in the History of the Late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East.

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century. His current project, provisionally titled The Book and the Sword: Civil War and Reconstruction in Late Ottoman Syria, offers a global microhistory of the Tanzimat period, centered on the unsolved murder of an American missionary in the Ottoman Empire.

Sıla Önder is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.

CREDITS

Episode No. 592

Release Date: 22 August 2026

Recording Location: University of Virginia

Sound production by Chris Gratien

Opening music by Chad Crouch. Closing music by Kara Güneş.

Bibliography courtesy of Mustafa Aksakal at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/08/aksakal.html

E591 | What did it mean to know the future in the early modern Ottoman Empire? And who had the authority to interpret the heavens? In this episode, A. Tunç Şen discusses his new book Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600. Şen takes us into the world of Ottoman court munajjims—astral experts whose work combined mathematical astronomy, astrological interpretation, and political counsel—and uncovers the roles they fulfilled within the Ottoman court bureaucracy. They advised rulers and officials not usually on whether something should happen, but on when, including the auspicious timing of military campaigns, building projects, ceremonies, and other acts of state. Their authority rested on technical skill, especially the ability to calculate planetary positions and the ascendant, as well as on a broader cosmological understanding of how the heavens shaped events on earth. Under Bayezid II, munajjims enjoyed unusual prestige and high salaries, reflecting the sultan’s own interest in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophical kingship. Under Süleyman, however, their standing declined, while other forms of esoteric expertise, such as geomancy and letterism, became more prominent. By following the salaries, writings, frustrations, and ambitions of Ottoman munajjims, Şen reconstructs a social history of scientific authority in the early modern Ottoman Empire.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/08/sen.html

A. Tunç Şen is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on Ottoman history, the history of science, and manuscript studies. His research focuses on the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the early modern Ottoman world. His first book, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600, was published by Stanford University Press in 2025.

Maryam Patton is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research interests span the cultural and intellectual history of the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire, the history and theories of time and temporality, and cross-cultural transmission in the Mediterranean world, among others. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is preparing her first book on the Ottoman conception of time.

CREDITS

Episode No. 591

Release Date: 14 August 2026

Sound production by Maryam Patton

Music: "Clean Soul" Kevin MacLeod

Images and bibliography courtesy of A. Tunç Şen at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/08/sen.html

E590 | In the late Ottoman capital, imperial politics became a field of collaboration and competition between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, especially in the years following the 1908 constitutional revolution. And as our guest Murat Yıldız argues in a new book, the world of sports also emerged as an arena of political contestation, as gymnasts, footballers, weightlifters, boxers, coaches, teachers, journalists, and fans pursued a civic project that blended athletics, aesthetics, morality, and community. Sport did not erase the communal boundaries that existed off the field, but it often transcended them, as middle and upper class men participated in a shared culture that equated the physical development of the body with the moral development of the person. In this conversation, we explore the Ottoman world of sports at the end of empire, as the growth of a multiethnic civil society facilitated to the proliferation of sports club and writing about athletics, gender, and the body in the Ottoman public press.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/07/sports.html

Murat Yıldız is Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College, where he teaches classes on popular culture, communal boundaries, the body, and the Middle East. He is the author of The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Ottoman Istanbul (The University of Texas Press).

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press.

CREDITS

Episode No. 570

Release Date: 2 August 2026

Sound production by Sam Dolbee

Music: Zé Trigueiros

Images and bibliography courtesy of Murat Yıldız available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/07/sports.html

E589 | Lafky entered the United States as a teenager on false pretenses, when her cousin presented her to immigration authorities as his legal wife. A decade later, when her real marriage devolved into a messy divorce, her husband used her prior illicit entry against her, reporting Lafky to immigration authorities and triggering a legal battle that lasted for years. Lafky's deportation file revealed that it was not her first ordeal. A survivor of the Greco-Turkish War, she, like many Ottoman-born Greeks, she had already lived many lives on a journey that brought her from the shores of Asia Minor to Athens and the United States. In this episode, we explore the stories, sounds, and sentiments of the Ottoman Greek diaspora in the wake of the Great Catastrophe and the Exchange of Populations through the extraordinary life of a single mother in New York City and her battle with the American deportation state.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/06/doap4.html

CREDITS

Episode No. 589 (DOAP No. 4)

Release Date: 20 June 2026

Archival research, script, and narration by Chris Gratien

Series Consultant: Emily Pope-Obeda

Episode Consultant: Panayotis League

Script Editor: Samuel Dolbee

Digitized phonographic music recordings (by order of first appearance): Tetos Demetriades - Aman Elenio; Jan August - Misirlou; Rita Abatzi - Gazeli Neva Sabah; Noukoutos Rigas - Ta mavra matia sou; Maria Papagika - Smyrnaiko Minore; Maria Papagika - Mpournovalio; Dimitris Perdikopoulos - Sou 'pa mana pantrepse me; The Cavaliers - A Faded Summer Love; Εργάτης Τιμημένος - Κώστας Ρούκουνας; Μπουζούκι μου διπλόχορδο - Παγιουμτζής & Βαμβακάρης; Roger Wolfe Kahn - A Little Birdie Told Me So; Roza Eskenazy - Yati foumaro kokaini

Additional music and sound production by Chris Gratien

E588 | What does canine life reveal about the human worlds of modern Istanbul? In this special collaboration with Keyman Podcast at Northwestern University, we sit down with Mine Yıldırım, curator of the exhibition "Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul," to discuss the intersecting histories of cruelty and compassion towards animals in Turkey's largest city from the late Ottoman period to the present.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/dogs.html

Mine Yıldırım is an assistant professor (Kadir Has University, Istanbul) of politics, researcher in urban and critical animal studies, and animal rights advocate. She received her PhD in Politics (2021) from The New School, New York, with a dissertation titled Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul, tracing the history and politics of Istanbul’s street dogs from the early twentieth century to today. Her research examines urban animal worlds, myriad entanglements of law, politics, everyday practices in the making of trans-species bonds, affective regimes of labor, killing and caring traversing human and more-than-human worlds. Her work, drawing on ethnographic and historical approaches, has appeared in books, journals, exhibits, and radio broadcasts, bridging academic research with community-based animal rights advocacy. Her archive research Between Care and Violence: Street Dogs of Istanbul was recently exhibited in Lives of Animals (curated by Joanna Zielinska) at Salt Beyoğlu (2025). She is currently preparing a book manuscript of the same title and developing archival and ethnographic research-led curatorial practices to integrate animal rights advocacy to broader publics in contemporary arts, humanities and social sciences.

Önder Eren Akgül is a historian of capitalism, political economy, and the environment in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. He received his Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University in 2022. He is currently the 2024-2026 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, where he is working on his first book manuscript examining the development of a socio-legal order rooted in austerity, violence, and dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire.

CREDITS

Episode No. 588

Release Date: 13 June 2026

Recording Location: Istanbul

Sound production by Can Gümüş

Music courtesy of Sato Moughalian

Bibliography and images courtesy of Mine Yıldırım

E587 | During the Cold War period, Turkish cinema flourished, as American films entered local theaters, television sets, and the studios of Yeşilçam. Yet as Jülide Etem argues in her new book, Film Diplomacy, the cinematic story of Turkey-US relations begins not with entertaining Hollywood movies that circled the globe but rather educational film productions that simultaneously furthered the interests of American overseas power and Turkish domestic policy. In this episode, we explore how film became a ubiquitous technology and tool of the nation-state in Turkey through informational movies, educational material designed for the classroom, and place-based documentaries that performed the dual role of promoting tourism and cultivating knowledge of the country's different provinces among its citizens. As Etem explains, these ambivalent co-productions shaped an image of Turkey's inclusion in the international order, making film an arena in which visions of Turkey could be used to reify notions of American supremacy, as the Turkish national elite claimed their own place among the white Euro-American civilizations that became as models for values like development and progress in the modern world.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/etem.html

Ayşehan Jülide Etem is assistant professor of media studies and director of the film studies concentration at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey-US Relations (Columbia University Press, 2026).

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.

Sıla Önder is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.

CREDITS

Episode No. 587

Release Date: 4 June 2026

Recording Location: University of Virginia

Sound production by Chris Gratien. Closing music by Kara Güneş.

Clips featured in the podcast in order: Tokat Belgeseli, 1975 (via YouTube); Turkey: A Middle East Bridgeland (via T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı); Turkey, 1949 (via YouTube) Bibliography and images courtesy of Jülide Etem at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/etem.html

E586 | What can a single, discarded scrap of paper reveal about life in Ottoman-era Cairo? In this episode, Jane Hathaway discusses her open-access book Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah. A genizah is a storeroom or repository where Jewish communities preserved worn-out texts and papers, especially those containing the name of God. Long famous for its medieval Jewish materials, the Cairo Genizah also preserves a rich and still understudied corpus of later Arabic- and Ottoman Turkish-script documents. The conversation explores some of this archive’s unexpected Ottoman afterlife, from Sharia court summaries and commercial records to petition letters, Sufi poetry, and an ilm-i hal primer on Islamic practice. The book, which presents the documents fully transcribed and translated with a scholarly commentary, sheds light on Jewish merchants and bankers, Ottoman officials, port customs in Damietta and Alexandria, sugar supplies bound for Istanbul, and the dense networks linking Cairo to the wider empire, and much more. The conversation also invites us to reflect on archives themselves: how documents survive, how scholars decipher them, and how collaborative reading can open new windows onto Ottoman and Jewish history.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/hathaway.html

Jane Hathaway is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1992 under the direction of Cemal Kafadar. She has published seven books and scores of articles related to Egypt and other Ottoman Arab provinces, the Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch, the legendary sword Zülfikar, and the Jewish messianic figure Sabbatai Zevi.

Maryam Patton is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research interests span the cultural and intellectual history of the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire, the history and theories of time and temporality, and cross-cultural transmission in the Mediterranean world, among others. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is preparing her first book on the Ottoman conception of time.

CREDITS

Episode No. 586

Release Date: 23 May 2026

Sound production by Maryam Patton

Music: "Vibing Over Venus" by Kevin MacLeod

Images and bibliography courtesy of Jane Hathaway at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/hathaway.html

E585 | Bu bölümde Ümit Kurt’un Aras Yayıncılık’tan çıkan kitabı Kanun ve Nizam Dairesinde: Soykırım Teknokratı Mustafa Reşat Mimaroğlu’nun İzinde Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Devlet Mekanizması temelinde 1915’in idari ve bürokratik boyutuna odaklanıyoruz. Mustafa Reşat Mimaroğlu örneğinde olduğu gibi “kanun ve nizam dairesinde” hareket eden bürokratlara odaklandığımız sohbetimizde, kolektif şiddet olaylarını olağanüstü kırılma anları olarak okumaktan ziyade bürokratik faillik biçimlerinin görünür hâle geldiği bir tarihsel bağlam içinde değerlendiriyoruz. Osmanlı’nın son döneminden Cumhuriyet’in ilk yıllarına orta-üst ölçekli bir bürokratın merkezî kararlarla saha arasındaki rolü nasıl şekillenmiştir? Devlet hizmeti, görev bilinci ve düzen söylemi bu dönemde nasıl bir anlam kazanmıştır? Faillik, yalnızca doğrudan eylemle değil, idari kararlar ve rutin pratikler üzerinden nasıl kurulmuştır? Podcast, bu sorular ekseninde 1915’i bürokrasi, faillik ve devlet işleyişi ekseninde yeniden düşünmeye davet ediyor.

https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/05/umitkurt.html

Ümit Kurt, ODTÜ’de lisans ve Sabancı Üniversitesi’nde yüksek lisans eğitiminin ardından 2016’da Clark Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü’nde doktorasını tamamladı. Ermeni soykırımı, mikro/yerel tarih, modern Türk milliyetçiliği ve kolektif şiddet gibi konularda Türkiye’de ve dünyada birçok dergi ve kitapta makaleleri yayımlandı. The Armenians of Aintab: Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province başlıklı son kitabı Harvard University Press tarafından Mayıs 2021’de yayımlandı. Halihazırda Avustralya’daki Newcastle Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü’nde öğretim üyesi olarak çalışmalarını sürdürmektedir.

Can Gümüş doktora derecesini Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk Enstitüsü’nden 2025 yılında aldı. Can’ın geç dönem Osmanlı İstanbul'unda hijyen, kentsel dönüşüm ve yönetişim arasındaki bağlantıları araştıran doktora tezi, İstanbul’u sıhhileştirme çabalarının kentin kendine özgü sosyo-politik ve coğrafi bağlamı içinde farklı aktörlerin birbiriyle ilişkileri çerçevesinde gerçekleştiğini göstermeyi amaçlar. Araştırma alanları kentsel çevre tarihi, halk sağlığı tarihi ve tıp tarihini kapsamaktadır. Hâlihazırda Boğaziçi Üniversitesi’nde modern Türkiye tarihi dersleri veren Can, OHP ekibine 2018 yılında katılmıştır.

YAPIM VE YAYIN

Bölüm No: 585

Yayın tarihi: 16 Mayıs 2026

Kayıt yeri: İstanbul

Ses Editörü: Can Gümüş

Görseller ve kaynakça Ümit Kurt'un müsaadesiyle

E584 | What is Islamic architecture? In this follow-up to our ten-part seires on The Making of the Islamic World, we explore that question with Prof. Abbey Stockstill, author of Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib. Our conversation centers on the imperial city of Marrakesh, which was shaped by two successive dynasties — the Almoravids and the Almohads — with two competing visions of Muslim religious and political life that left an indelible imprint on the Maghreb region from the Sahara to al-Andalus. As Prof. Stockstill explains, understanding the architectural legacy of these dynasties extends far beyond the confines of monumental features of mosques and minarets. Natural landscapes and agricultural spaces played an equally vital role in the built environment of medieval Morocco, which in turn influenced the development of architecture in what is now southern Spain during the last centuries of Islamic rule.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/04/architecture-and-environment-in.html

Abbey Stockstill is Associate Professor and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair of Architectural History at UVA. Her book, Marrakesh & the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghreb, traces the development of Marrakesh in the twelfth century as a new kind of metropolis in the Islamic west, bridging multivalent identities through a sensitive manipulation of the surrounding environment.

Chris Gratien is Associate Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, explores the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region of Southern Turkey during the 19th and 20th century.

CREDITS

Episode No. 584

Release Date: 25 April 2026

Recording Location: University of Virginia

Sound production by Chris Gratien

Music: Komiku - Un désert; Badlands by Silicon Transmitter; TRG Banks - Across the mountainous region

Bibliography and images courtesy of Abbey Stockstill at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2026/04/architecture-and-environment-in.html