Date:
Location:
In honor of the recent publication of the English edition of The Ottoman Scientific Heritage by Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, translated by Maryam Patton, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation are hosting a two-day symposium on April 26-27, 2024 at Harvard University.
PROGRAM
Friday, April 26: The Keynote and Roundtable
The Harvard Faculty Club, Room 205, 20 Quincy Street
4:00pm - 6:00pm
Opening remarks by Sharaf Yamani, Al-Furqan Foundation
Keynote by Prof. Dr. Hans Georg Majer, Institut für den Nahen und Mittleren Osten, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Roundtable chaired by Carter Findley with Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, Maryam Patton, and Hannah Marcus.
Saturday, April 27: Symposium on the Ottoman Scientific Heritage: Past, Present, and Future
Belfer Case Study Rm (S020), CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St
10:00am - 4:30pm
Session 1: 10:00am-12:30pm
Cemil Aydin, Professor of History, UNC
Tunç Şen, Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Nükhet Varlık, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University
Tuncay Zorlu, Professor, Istanbul Technical University
Lunch break
Session 2: 2:00-4:30pm
Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu
Cemal Kafadar
Maryam Patton
Speaker bios:
Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu is a scholar, diplomat, and a pioneer for the history of Ottoman science and institutions of learning. He was the founder and chair of the first Department of the History of Science in Turkey at the University of Istanbul, and the Founding Director from 1980 for the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA). In 1989 he founded the Turkish Society for the History of Science. He has authored, edited and co-authored many volumes, including 18 volumes detailing the History of Ottoman Scientific Literature, published by IRCICA. In 2007, he was awarded the Alexandre Koyré Medal by the International Academy of the History of Science for his scholarship on Ottoman science.
Hans Georg Majer is Emeritus Professor of the History and Culture of the Near East and Turkology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. His main interest is in the history and culture of the Ottoman Empire. His publications include: Vorstudien zur Geschichte der İlmiye im Osmanischen Reich (1978), Das osmanische “Registerbuch der Beschwerden” (Şikāyet Defteri) vom Jahre 1675 (1984), Lexikon der islamischen Welt together with Klaus Kreiser and Werner Diem, as well as countless articles and contributions to edited volumes.
Carter Findley is Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the History Department at Ohio State University. His area of research is the history of Islamic civilization, with emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He also co-founded Ohio State's world history program. His newest book, A History of the Ottoman Empire, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Cemal Kafadar is the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies at Harvard University and Director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. A sampling of his published works includes Between Two Worlds (1995), Kendine Ait Bir Roma (2017), and Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (2019), which he co-edited with Gülru Necipoğlu and Cornell Fleischer.
Hannah Marcus is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Her first book, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy explores the censorship of medical knowledge.
Maryam Patton is a PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University writing a dissertation on Ottoman conceptions of time. She translated The Ottoman Scientific Heritage by Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu into English and will be Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at Wesleyan University starting in 2025.
Cemil Aydın is a Professor of International and Global history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His interests focus on both Modern Middle Eastern History and Modern Asian history. His publications include the Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007) and The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Spring 2017), among others.
Tunç Şen is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. His research spans the history of science, manuscript culture, the history of emotions, and the social history of scholarship. His first book, based on his award-winning dissertation, is forthcoming and tentatively titled Forgotten Experts: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600.
Nükhet Varlık is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Her first book, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed.
Tuncay Zorlu is a Professor at Istanbul Technical University where he teaches Ottoman History and the History of Science and Technology. His first book, Innovation and Empire in Turkey: Sultan Selim III and the Modernisation of the Ottoman Navy (2008), explores the ramifications of technological transformations that the Ottoman Navy underwent during Sultan Selim III’s reign.
Contact: Liz Flanagan