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The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents
Nora Lessersohn
Visiting Fellow, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
In this talk I will examine Christopher Oscanyan's representations of Turkish life and people to an American audience in the 1850s-60s. Together we will think about Oscanyan's illustrated lectures on the "Women of Turkey;" his Turkish Coffee House in Manhattan; and his photographs of "Slavery in Turkey" and the "Circassian Slave Girl." The focus of a chapter of my book project, The Sultan of New York: An Ottoman Armenian in Nineteenth-Century America, this talk will ask what it meant to be "authentic" in America at this time, particularly as it pertained to the depictions of foreign people and places.
Nora Lessersohn is a historian of the United States and the world, with a focus on US-Ottoman relations and the lives of Armenian Americans. She earned her PhD in history from University College London in 2023, writing a dissertation on the life and work of Christopher Oscanyan (1818-95). In 2021-22, she was a Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of American History. She earned her AB in the study of religion at Harvard College and her AM in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Memory Studies, and Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Contact: Liz Flanagan