Episode 442 with Sunil Sharma hosted by Shireen Hamza and Naveena Naqvi Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Professor Sunil Sharma shares his research on the cast of poets who wrote Persian poetry in India, and the poetic idea of Mughal India as a paradise, or an “Arcadia.” (He also shares some excerpts of this lovely poetry with us!) We discuss how specific regions, like Kashmir, became a hot new topic in Persian poetry, and explore the kinds of competitions that emerged between poets from different places across a broader “Persianate” world. The courtly environments in which these poets found patronage were multilingual and multiracial environments — where someone could enjoy poetry in Persian, Braj Bhasha, Hindavi and Chaghatai Turkish — but in this time, Persian poetry was what got you a job. By studying both poetry and painting, he reflects on the racial differences mentioned by poets, especially the initial difference between those born in India and those who had migrated from Iran and were “native speakers” of Persian. Finally, we discuss different meanings of the term “Indo-Persian,” in the study of the centuries that Persian was used as a language of governance, literature and science in India. « Click for More »

Episode 436 with Rawan Arar, Andrew Arsan, Reem Bailony, and Neda Maghbouleh hosted by Chris Gratien Audience questions by Joshua Donovan, Nihal Kayali, Nova Robinson, and Ben Smith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this roundtable entitled "Narrating Migration: Emerging Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Directions," held at the 2019 Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, two historians--Reem Bailony and Andrew Arsan--and two sociologists--Rawan Arar and Neda Maghbouleh discuss their experiences and approaches to studying migration. Throughout this conversation with our four authors about their own research, we speak to the following questions: What are the promises and dangers of narrative in migration studies? What role do language and affect play in writing migrant stories? How should we write them? How do different disciplines approach migration? What challenges and possibilities are presented by the source base? How do various sources (e.g., state, personal, oral) intersect or diverge? What are overlooked areas (e.g., spatial, temporal, political, social) with regard to migration and the modern Middle East? How do experiences of MENA migration and diaspora contribute to migration studies broadly speaking? How does this work impact historiographies of the Global North, South-South relations, and other places where MENA migrants have gone? What promise might the study of MENA migration hold for decolonial scholarship? « Click for More »

Episode 434 with Sarah Abrevaya Stein hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein speaks to us about the journey of one Jewish family from Ottoman Salonica in the late nineteenth century to Manchester, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and beyond during the twentieth century. In her new book Family Papers, she reveals the poignant continuities and changes that accompanied the Sephardic family's movement from an imperial world into a national one through stories of displacement and genocide, endurance and survival. She also discusses the cache of family papers that allowed her to provide this uniquely intimate vantage on large-scale historical transformations. « Click for More »

Episode 433 with David Gutman hosted by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Beginning in the 1880s, thousands of Ottoman Armenians left the Harput region bound for places all around the world. The Ottoman state viewed these migrants as threats, both for their feared political connections and their possession of foreign legal protections. In this episode, David Gutman discusses the smuggling networks that emerged in response to these legal restrictions, as well as the evolving understandings of citizenship they entailed. Restrictions on movement were repealed after the Constitutional Revolution in 1908, but the respite from control of motion would be short-lived for Harput's Armenians, many of whom were killed in the genocide of 1915. « Click for More »

Episode 430 with Nurfadzilah Yahaya hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the 19th century, Southeast Asia came under British and Dutch colonial rule. Yet despite the imposition of foreign institutions and legal codes, Islamic law remained an important part of daily life. In fact, as our guest Fadzilah Yahaya argues, Islamic law in the region underwent significant transformation as a result of British and Dutch policies. But rather than merely a top-down transformation, Yahaya highlights the role of the small and largely mercantile Arab diaspora as a major factor in European policy towards Islamic law in Southeast Asia. In our conversation, we  discuss Islamic law and the Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia during the colonial period as well as some of the more unusual court cases arising from this period and the implications of this history for Southeast Asia today. « Click for More »

Episode 425 with Alp Eren Topal hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Alp Eren Topal traces the history of medical metaphors for describing and diagnosing state and society in Ottoman political thought. From the balancing of humors prescribed by Galenic medicine to the lifespan of the state described by Ibn Khaldun and the germ theory of nineteenth-century biomedicine, we explore some of the ways people thought about the state and its health or illness in the early-modern and modern Mediterranean world. How did these metaphors and images change over time, and how did they inform the policies of the Empire and its rulers? « Click for More »

Episode 424 with Samhita Sunya hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The 1001 Nights, an Arabic collection of tales, have been translated into numerous languages and adapted to many cultural contexts. In this episode, we explore the impact of the 1001 Nights on the history of cinema. As our guest Samhita Sunya explains, the 1001 Nights corpus influenced Western cinema from the earliest decades of the medium's rise. However, in our conversation, we focus on the cinematic influence of the tales beyond Europe and North America. From Japan and South Asia to Iran and the Caucasus, we discuss the many forms the 1001 Nights have assumed in cinema the world over and reflect on the significance of the often ignored connections between these different world regions. « Click for More »

Bölüm 422 Fatih Artvinli ve Ebru Aykut Sunucu Can Gümüş Podcast'i indir Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Edebiyat ve kurmacanın tarihyazımına sunduğu imkânlar nelerdir? Bu bölümde, aynı kuşaktan 14 genç tarihçinin arşiv belgesi, gazete kupürü, günlük, mektup gibi tarihsel bir malzemeden ya da metinden yola çıkarak kurguladığı öykülerden oluşan "Tarihçilerden Başka Bir Hikâye" kitabı üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Kitabın editörlerinden Fatih Artvinli ve Ebru Aykut ile tarihsel gerçeklik, edebiyat ve kurmacanın ilişkisini değerlendirirken, kitabın nasıl bir tarihyazımsal müdahaleye işaret ettiğini tartışıyoruz. « Click for More »

a:hover { cursor:pointer; } Episode 419 with İpek Hüner Cora hosted by Işın Taylan Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Ottoman literature is heavily associated with verse, namely, Ottoman court poetry, and to some extent, folk literature. Ottoman stories, however, remain unexplored, even though they circulated in the empire and entertained many. For us, today, they are an invaluable source to study daily life, gender and space in the early modern Ottoman world. What is an Ottoman story? What do Ottoman stories tell us? In this episode, İpek Hüner Cora joins the podcast to talk about fictional prose stories in the Ottoman Empire and we discuss the gendered and spatial aspects of stories scattered in manuscript collections. « Click for More »

Episode 417 with Devi Mays hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud After their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula during the 15th century, Jewish communities settled throughout the Mediterranean, with many finding new homes in the cities of the ascendant Ottoman Empire. Centuries later, Ottoman Jews descended from this early modern diaspora still spoke a language related to Spanish, often referred to as Ladino. During the late 19th century, a new wave of migration out of the Eastern Mediterranean began, giving rise to a modern Sephardi diaspora of migrants from modern-day Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and other parts of the former Ottoman world. As our guest Devi Mays explains in this interview, the Iberian heritage and language of these migrants played a distinct role in their global migration experience, as many ended up settling in countries like Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina. In this episode, we explore the history of the modern Sephardi diaspora and its relationship to the history of Mexico. In some cases, Ladino-speaking Jews from the former Ottoman Empire appeared as welcome immigrants in Mexico even when Jews from other parts of the world faced discrimination and increased immigration restriction during the 20th century. In other cases, Iberian heritage meant that Jews looking to settle in the United States could pass as Mexican or Cuban nationals when seeking to cross the border. Through the individual experiences and lives that comprise the modern Sephardi diaspora, we highlight the unique experiences of migrants mediated by gender and class, and we appreciate the strategies such people developed to navigate an increasingly anti-immigrant world. « Click for More »

Episode 414 with Suja Sawafta hosted by Chris Gratien and Rebecca Alemayehu Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Abdul Rahman Munif is one of the most celebrated authors in the Arabic language. In this episode, we sit down with literature scholar Suja Sawafta to learn about the social and political experiences that shaped Munif as an author, and in particular, we explore the role of the environment in some his most important works such as Cities of Salt. We discuss why Munif's politics led him to literature, and we explore how through his fiction writing, Munif provides a vivid account and critique of the history of oil and its impact in the Middle East. « Click for More »

Episode 412 with Ian Nagoski hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of people from the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states emigrated to the U.S. Among them were musicians, singers, and artists who catered to the new diaspora communities that emerged in cities like New York and Boston. During the early 20th century, with the emergence of a commercial recording industry in the United States, these artists appeared on 78 rpm records that circulated within the diaspora communities of the former Ottoman Empire in the United States and beyond, singing in languages such as Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Ladino. Their music included folks songs from their homelands and new compositions about life and love in the diaspora. In this episode, Ian Nagoski of Canary Records joins the podcast to showcase some of these old recordings, which he has located and digitized over the years, and we discuss some of the remarkable life stories of these largely forgotten artists in American music history. « Click for More »

Episode 407 with Heghnar Watenpaugh hosted by Emily Neumeier Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The genre of biography usually applies to people, but could a similar approach be applied to an object? Can a thing have a life of its own? In this episode, Heghnar Watenpaugh explores this question by tracing the long journey of the Zeytun Gospels, a famous illuminated manuscript considered to be a masterpiece of medieval Armenian art. Protected for centuries in a remote church in eastern Anatolia, the sacred book traveled with the waves of people displaced by the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the chaos of the First World War, it was divided in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty Museum in LA. In this interview, we discuss how the Zeytun Gospels could be understood as a "survivor object," contributing to current discussions about the destruction of cultural heritage. We also talk about the challenges of writing history for a broader reading public. « Click for More »

Episode 404 with Stacy Fahrenthold hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud By the time of the First World War, there were roughly 500,000 Lebanese and Syrians in the Americas. And as Stacy Fahrenthold argues in a new book entitled Between the Ottomans and the Entente, this diaspora played a critical role in the transformation of politics in Greater Syria over a period of incredible flux. In our conversation, we discuss how the diaspora embraced and sustained the revolutionary fervor of the post-1908 Ottoman Empire into the First World War, when loyalties to the Ottomans and their Entente adversaries were divided. After the war, this diaspora likewise sought to influence the outcome of the postwar map after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But what would be the fate of the Greater Syrian diaspora with the establishment of the French Mandates? « Click for More »

Episode 403 with Sarah Abrevaya Stein hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Many students of Middle Eastern history know that that some non-Muslims subjects of the Ottoman Empire became "proteges" of European states in the nineteenth century and thus acquired extraterritorial legal protections. While we know the institutional history of extraterritoriality, the individual motivations and histories of those who chose to become proteges is relatively unknown. In this podcast, Sarah Stein speaks about what extraterritoriality meant to those Jews of the former Ottoman Empire that chose to take this path. In particular, it exposes the tenuous meaning of citizenship in the quickly changing legal world of the early twentieth century, as empires collapsed and new regime of borders and national belonging emerged. « Click for More »

Episode 400 with Nir Shafir hosted by Suzie Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Nir Shafir talks about the problem of "fake minatures" of Islamic science: small paintings that look old, but are actually contemporary productions. As these images circulate in museums, on book covers, and on the internet, they tell us more about what we want "Islamic science" to be than what it actually was. That, Nir tells us, is a lost opportunity. « Click for More »

Episode 399 with Zeynep Çelik hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan and Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How did the Ottomans react to European attitudes and depictions of their own lands? Pondering on the groundbreaking book 'Orientalism' by Edward Said forty years after its publication, our guest Zeynep Çelik discusses the ways in which urban, art, and architectural historians have grappled with representations of the Ottomans by Europeans and representations of Ottomans by Ottomans themselves. Telling us about a number of paintings, monuments, scholarly writings and stories, she argues that Orientalism is still relevant and with us wherever we go. « Click for More »

Episode 396 with Orhan Pamuk and Nükhet Varlık featuring A. Tunç Şen presented by Sam Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this special episode, novelist Orhan Pamuk and historian Nükhet Varlık discuss how to write about plague and epidemics in Ottoman history. Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose works such as My Name is Red drew masterfully on the literature and art of early modern Ottoman society. In an ongoing project, Pamuk is turning his attention towards the Ottoman experience of plague. Nükhet Varlık is a historian whose award-winning book Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 was the first to systematically examine the history of the Black Death and subsequent plague outbreaks from the vantage point of the Ottoman state and its subjects. Varlık is currently involved in multidisciplinary collaborations with scientific researchers who are using new methods to solve longstanding mysteries about past plagues. In this wide-ranging conversation organized by Tunç Şen and the Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies at Columbia University and presented by Sam Dolbee, Pamuk, and Varlık discuss the Ottoman experience of plague from a variety of angles. Varlık describes how new research is overturning many misconceptions about the plague and its history, allowing writers of all varieties to re-imagine the Ottoman encounter with plague, and Pamuk discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by using fiction to address the very real experience of plague in past contexts.  This podcast is based on a recording of a free public event entitled "Imagining & Narrating Plague in the Ottoman World: A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk & Nükhet Varlık" held on November 12, 2018 at Columbia University organized by A. Tunç Şen and The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies. The event was sponsored by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, The Columbia University School of the Arts, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and The Department of History at Columbia University. « Click for More »