Department Faculty

“I am a historian of the Ottoman Empire and I am particularly interested in social, cultural and religious history of the early modern Ottoman and wider Mediterranean world.  In this context, I specialize in relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, cultural encounter and mediation between Christendom and Islamdom, late Byzantine history, Ottoman-Venetian-Habsburg imperial rivalry, as well as subjects like Christian and Muslim mysticism and eschatology.  In my doctoral research I explored the ways in which Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim individuals, communities, and institutions conceptualized and narrated conversion to Islam and how these narratives were used by authors and their audiences to (re)draw the boundaries of their moral communities.  By focusing on popular and often anonymous narrative genres of both Ottoman Muslim and Christian provenance (in Ottoman Turkish, various Balkan and Western European languages) in this project I sought to advance the debate on conversion and inter-faith politics in the Ottoman Empire by highlighting the role of social and family networks (rather than the typically emphasized state and religious institutions) in the processes of religious conversion.   I am currently working on a book that contextualizes Ottoman practices and narratives of conversion in a wider early modern Mediterranean framework.”