with Nicholas Morton hosted by Maryam Patton | The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history, yet its influence on the social and political history of the realms that came under its domain is often minimized due to its short-lived nature. In some ways, the most lasting effects of the Mongol invasions were the unexpected geopolitical shakeups that their arrival brought. Notable examples included the increase in the slave trade which facilitated the rise of the Mamluk sultanate, or the controlled chaos of competing Turkmen tribes who had fled to Anatolia, setting the stage for the eventual rise of the Ottomans. The Mongols were not merely invaders, however, and an overemphasis on military history often conceals the rich cultural history of a nomadic society with its own religious traditions and policies of tolerance towards the diverse societies of the medieval Near East. In this episode, we discuss these topics and more with Nicholas Morton, the author of a new book on the Mongols, entitled The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. « Click for More »

with Ayşe Zarakol hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | What did the international system look like before the rise of the West? What was the place of the Ottomans within it? How did the Ottomans claimed sovereignty and recognition from other states in the sixteenth century world order? In this episode Ayşe Zarakol discusses the rise and fall of Eastern world orders from the Mongol times to the mid-eighteenth century. She critically interrogates both Euro-centric and Sino-centric histories of international relations in order to emphasise the Chingisid universal claims and their evolution throughout the centuries. Considering the Ottomans within this longue duree history, Zarakol emphasises the notion of millenial sovereignty that put the Ottomans in competition with the Safavids and the Mughals and how the crisis of the seventeenth century dismantled this world order and contributed to a sense of decline. « Click for More »

with Elizabeth Graver hosted by Brittany White | Elizabeth Graver grew up knowing her grandmother Rebecca was from the Ottoman Empire and that her tumultuous, meandering life journey, like many in the Ottoman Sephardi diaspora, had taken her to Spain, Cuba, and finally, the United States. Like so many of us, she wanted to know more about her family history. Graver was twenty-one when she recorded her first interviews with her grandmother. Over the decades, this family history project would eventually become Kantika-—a historical novel inspired by the multigenerational story of Graver's family. In Kantika, she crafts compelling fiction from historical facts as she retraces her grandmother’s journey. Our conversation with Graver will explore familiar themes like migration, displacement, identity, and belonging after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And we’ll also reflect on the possibilities and challenges of writing intimate family histories as literature and how fiction can help us better conceptualize and understand the past. « Click for More »

with Chloe Bordewich hosted by Maryam Patton | In times of conflict, state governments can be especially sensitive about protecting secrets. When new technologies are involved, like the telegraph, confusion over how exactly it functions and whether it is secure invite new debates over the nature of knowledge and what the public has the right to know. In this episode, Chloe Bordewich discusses her research about news, leaks, and propaganda in modern Egypt. By highlighting a particular court case around the turn of the 20th century involving leaks of sensitive military information and telegraph operators, Bordewich shows how Egypt was at the center of a global story involving the Egyptian public's right to knowledge, new technologies, and the pressures of colonialism. « Click for More »

Fatma Aladağ & Yunus Uğur Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Dijital beşeri bilimlerin Osmanlı tarihyazımına sunduğu imkânlar nelerdir? Bu sohbetimizde, Osmanlı ve Türkiye Çalışmaları perspektifinden Dijital Beşeri Bilimler'e katkıda bulunan dijital projeleri, araçları ve yayınları bir araya getiren bir platform olan Digital Ottoman Studies’in çalışmaları ve tarihyazımına katkılarını değerlendiriyoruz. Platformun kurucusu Fatma Aladağ ve proje yöneticisi Doç. Dr. Yunus Uğur ile dijital beşeri bilimler perspektifi alanın mevcut kaynaklarını ve çalışmalarını nasıl zenginleştirebilir sorusuna odaklanırken, bu yaklaşımın kısıtlarını da tartışmaya açıyoruz. « Click for More »