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Duygu Yildirim

University of Tennessee Knoxville, History, Faculty Member

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I am a historian of science and medicine specialized in the early modern Mediterranean and in the Ottoman Empire (Ph.D. in History, Stanford University, 2021). Broadly, my work focuses on cross-cultural interactions, translation, materiality, scientific labor, foodways, critical historiography, and the relationship between knowledge-making and faith.

My current book project, "Uncertain Knowledge: The Making of Slow Science between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe" (under advance contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press) comparatively explores the role of translation and uncertainty in the making of botanical and medicinal knowledge. I am the co-editor of "Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds" (Routledge, 2023), which shows how natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins during the rise of modern life sciences. My articles have appeared in Journal of Early Modern History, BJHS (Themes), History of Science, History of Religions, and Journal of Ottoman Studies.

If you do not have institutional access to my articles, please feel free to reach out via email at dyildir1@utk.edu. Thank you for your interest.

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Articles by Duygu Yildirim

The Translating Subject: Self-Assertion and Edges of Mediation in Ali Ufkî's Bilingual Dialogues

Journal of Early Modern History, 2024

Why did translation matter for early modern translators themselves? Approaching Ottoman court tra... more Why did translation matter for early modern translators themselves? Approaching Ottoman court translator and religious convert to Islam, Ali Ufkî's (né Wojciech Bobowski, ca. 1610-1677) intellectual endeavors, this article explores the multilayered relationship among translation, commensurability, and transmission of cultural knowledge by focusing on the translating subject. It argues that translation was an epistemic posture taken on by translators operating in complex cultural landscapes to navigate their self-assertion within the contours of cultural mediation in late seventeenth-century Istanbul. In so doing, it suggests reading translations beyond imperial logics and their concomitant historiographical terms.

Back to the future: a belated history of 'new' science in the Ottoman Empire

British Journal for the History of Science Themes, 2024

What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article ... more What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of 'new medicine' in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting it as a unified category, I argue that Ottoman physicians used 'new' as a loose, multivalent and discursive term whose potentiality lay in its malleability for future use. Ready to bear any contingent meaning at a certain point in the future, the 'new' became a strategic tool to cope with the uncertainties evoked by early modern globalization and local epistemic crisis. It also helped Ottoman scholars and physicians develop a tentative design for how much information, and of what sort, was just enough for the learned and laypeople to know during precarious times. I further discuss the fact that since the Ottoman motivation for the usage of the notion of the 'new' is without a decisive motive, it still haunts our historiographical debates about what was truly new about Ottoman science.

“Ottoman Plants, Nature Studies, and the Attentiveness of Translational Labor," History of Science 61 (4): 497–521.

History of Science, 2023

Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowled... more Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowledge-making in multiple ways. It offered a refuge, severed contexts, and concealed the various workers that created it. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European naturalists in Istanbul, such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), procured illustrations of Ottoman nature as fundamental resources to identify, collect, and compare indigenous plants and newly bred varieties. Despite maintaining an actual mediation for cross-cultural interactions, these sources of virtual communication remain largely forgotten in modern scholarship. This article argues that this curious yet invisible corpus was not a nonagentive medium in an alienated leisure of a gentlemanscholar; instead, these illustrations were designed to call upon the viewer's constant attention in self-motivated scientific labor. Such handy tools responded and contributed to early modern scholars' modes of working, and in exchange they determined these sources' own function, position, and visibility-either as a by-product or as a derivative. It is therefore only when integrated into the labor history of science that the degrees of invisibility pertaining to both Ottoman nature studies and self-directed labor can come into a granular view.

"Comparing Faiths: The Making of Religious Dialogue between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe," History of Religions 63 (2023): 198–227.

History of Religions , 2023

As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the com... more As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the complex relation between faith and knowledge during an era of interreligious conflict and changing political allegiances. Taking seventeenth-century Istanbul as a case study, this article examines how and why religious conflict unintentionally led to a new form of religious dialogue that stimulated knowledge exchange between Muslims and Christians. The changing nature of interreligious dialogue between Ottomans and Europeans occurred in the context of ongoing religious crises on both sides: within Muslim communities and between Western and Eastern Christianities. It argues that confessional conflict ironically helped to develop grounds for a rapprochement between Ottoman and European intellectual worlds to redefine faith beyond the textual domains of theology. Through scholarly engagements, learned Europeans began to appreciate commonality with respect to matters of faith, while also becoming gradually aware that distinct individuals of the same religion vary on the nature of true faith. Faith eventually began to be understood in its own pluralities and irreconcilable conflicts through everyday encounters in Istanbul. By comparing faiths in Islam, early modern scholars faced the paradox of their own time: the irreducibility of religious difference within any one religion. Recapturing the genealogy of the comparative approach to faith in the form of dialogue, this study sheds light on the origins of religious relativism, which is conventionally associated with the European Enlightenment.

Bevanda asiatica: Scholarly Exchange between the Ottomans and Europeans on Coffee [2021 Article Prize - Honorable Mention by the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI)]

Journal of Ottoman Studies / Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi , 2020

Focusing on Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s neglected treatise, "Bevanda asiatica" (1685), this artic... more Focusing on Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s neglected treatise, "Bevanda asiatica" (1685), this article explores knowledge exchanges between the Ottomans and Europeans in the late seventeenth century. "Bevanda asiatica" was based on Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s encyclopedic entry on coffee as well as on Marsigli’s own experiences both as a naturalist and as a slave-cook in Ottoman lands. Marsigli stated that Hezarfenn’s empirically driven depiction of the coffee plant was “the most original source” on coffee. By analyzing how and why Marsigli selected Hezarfenn’s text, this article sheds light onto the practices of cross-cultural knowledge exchanges in the early modernity.

Books by Duygu Yildirim

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds

by Mackenzie Cooley, Duygu Yildirim, and Anna Toledano

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Co-edited with Anna Toledano and Duygu Yildirim. London/New York: Routledge, 2023. , 2023

The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore... more The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things—ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo—and the humans enthralled with them.　

Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade.

Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the first study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will find new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences.

Papers by Duygu Yildirim

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds [Introduction]

by Duygu Yildirim, Mackenzie Cooley, and Anna Toledano

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds, 2023

The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore... more The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things—ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo—and the humans enthralled with them.　

Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade.

Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the first study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will find new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003351054/natural-things-early-modern-worlds-mackenzie-cooley-anna-toledano-duygu-yıldırım?refId=b47cb2d7-0d26-4e7e-9165-1d51092afcc5&context=ubx

Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds , 2023

Abstract: What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies tha... more Abstract: What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies that consume it? This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between sense and scientific sensibility in the making of knowledge about coffee. As an iconic beverage of early modern globalization, coffee belied easy categorization. Baffled drinkers of coffee—from naturalists and physicians to merchants—tried to come up with a sufficiently expansive definition of this new and ambiguous plant from the Ottoman lands. Europeans had to rely on their senses, particularly gustatory, while creating an embodied knowledge of coffee. This sensational encounter with the Turkish drink, however, brought new anxieties to occlude the fellow feeling among coffee drinkers across religions, resulting in a differentiation of the innately melancholic Turkish body. Inter-cultural encounters of the senses around coffee thus embodied the tension between alienating the self from the object of inquiry and peering into sensations as an epistemic practice.

In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023), ed. by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, Duygu Yıldırım.

https://www.routledge.com/Natural-Things-in-Early-Modern-Worlds/Cooley/p/book/9781032397207

"Orhan Pamuk, me, and Two Men from the Seventeenth Century" – Environmental History Now

Environmental History Now, 2024

https://envhistnow.com/2024/03/12/orhan-pamuk-me-and-two-men-from-the-seventeenth-century/

Merak ve Endişe Çeperinde Kahve: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndan Avrupa’ya Bedenin Bir Tarihi

Toplumsal Tarih, 2021

“Merak ve Endişe Çeperinde Kahve: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndan Avrupa’ya Bedenin Bir Tarihi [Coffee... more

"Global Bilim Tarihi [Global History of Science]," Toplumsal Tarih, 333 (2021).

Toplumsal Tarih, 2021

Book Reviews by Duygu Yildirim

Review of Natalie Rothman's "The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism" (Cornell, 2021)

EuropeNow, 2023

The age of dragomans: language and the origins of Orientalist scholarship https://www.europeno... more

Review of Helen Pfeifer's "Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands" (Princeton, 2022)

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022

International Journal of Middle East Studies 54 (2022): 608–10.

Review of Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim's "Re Orienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters along the Silk Roads," London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

H-Sci-Med-Tech, 2022

Duygu Yıldırım. Review of Yoeli-Tlalim, Ronit. ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters alon... more

Review of Simon Mills's "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1760" (Oxford, 2020)

Journal of Jewish Studies, 2021

Review of Elias Muhanna's "The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition," Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Nazariyat, 2018

Elias Muhanna. The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. Princeton ... more Elias Muhanna. The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. 232 pages. ISBN: 9781400887859. In the age of Wikipedia, encyclopedias seem to offer an openly editable content. Yet there was a time when ambitious individuals sought to write compendiums of universal knowledge on their own. Some of them failed because they did not live long enough to complete such enormous projects; however, one of those who succeeded was the late medieval scholar al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333). Elias Muhanna's book recounts how this scholar managed to create such an enormous compendium.

Review of Elias Muhannas's "The World in a Book" (in Turkish)

Review of "Elias Muhanna. 'The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition... more

Review of Miri Shefer-Mossensohn's "Science among the Ottomans," in 'Early Science and Medicine'

Early Science and Medicine, 2017

Book Review: "“Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, 'Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exc... more

Workshops & Conferences by Duygu Yildirim

The Making and Unmaking of Identities in the Early Modern Mediterranean Workshop

by Duygu Yildirim and Tommaso Stefini

EUI, Florence ITALY, 2022

When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dis... more When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dissolved? In the past twenty years, historiography has defined the early modern Mediterranean as a region in flux where categories of belonging and classification were continuously created, contested, and remade according to political, economical, and social circumstances. This workshop questions the trend of seeing the Mediterranean merely as a space of coexistence and fluidity and aims to foster new insights and methodological approaches to the historical studies on the early modern Mediterranean.

For Registration:

https://www.eui.eu/events?id=542914

International workshop organized by the Department of History and Civilization with the contribution of the EUI Decentering Eurocentrism Interdisciplinary Research Cluster and the Max Weber Programme.

EUI, Florence (12-13 May, 2022)

Karın Ağrısı: Yemek, Beden ve Bilim Tarihlerini Beraber Düşünmek

Akl-ı Kıssa Salı Konuşmaları (Tarih Vakfı) Karın Ağrısı: Yemek, Beden ve Bilim Tarihlerini Berab... more

The Translating Subject: Self-Assertion and Edges of Mediation in Ali Ufkî's Bilingual Dialogues

Journal of Early Modern History, 2024

Why did translation matter for early modern translators themselves? Approaching Ottoman court tra... more Why did translation matter for early modern translators themselves? Approaching Ottoman court translator and religious convert to Islam, Ali Ufkî's (né Wojciech Bobowski, ca. 1610-1677) intellectual endeavors, this article explores the multilayered relationship among translation, commensurability, and transmission of cultural knowledge by focusing on the translating subject. It argues that translation was an epistemic posture taken on by translators operating in complex cultural landscapes to navigate their self-assertion within the contours of cultural mediation in late seventeenth-century Istanbul. In so doing, it suggests reading translations beyond imperial logics and their concomitant historiographical terms.

Back to the future: a belated history of 'new' science in the Ottoman Empire

British Journal for the History of Science Themes, 2024

What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article ... more What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of 'new medicine' in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting it as a unified category, I argue that Ottoman physicians used 'new' as a loose, multivalent and discursive term whose potentiality lay in its malleability for future use. Ready to bear any contingent meaning at a certain point in the future, the 'new' became a strategic tool to cope with the uncertainties evoked by early modern globalization and local epistemic crisis. It also helped Ottoman scholars and physicians develop a tentative design for how much information, and of what sort, was just enough for the learned and laypeople to know during precarious times. I further discuss the fact that since the Ottoman motivation for the usage of the notion of the 'new' is without a decisive motive, it still haunts our historiographical debates about what was truly new about Ottoman science.

“Ottoman Plants, Nature Studies, and the Attentiveness of Translational Labor," History of Science 61 (4): 497–521.

History of Science, 2023

Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowled... more Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowledge-making in multiple ways. It offered a refuge, severed contexts, and concealed the various workers that created it. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European naturalists in Istanbul, such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), procured illustrations of Ottoman nature as fundamental resources to identify, collect, and compare indigenous plants and newly bred varieties. Despite maintaining an actual mediation for cross-cultural interactions, these sources of virtual communication remain largely forgotten in modern scholarship. This article argues that this curious yet invisible corpus was not a nonagentive medium in an alienated leisure of a gentlemanscholar; instead, these illustrations were designed to call upon the viewer's constant attention in self-motivated scientific labor. Such handy tools responded and contributed to early modern scholars' modes of working, and in exchange they determined these sources' own function, position, and visibility-either as a by-product or as a derivative. It is therefore only when integrated into the labor history of science that the degrees of invisibility pertaining to both Ottoman nature studies and self-directed labor can come into a granular view.

"Comparing Faiths: The Making of Religious Dialogue between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe," History of Religions 63 (2023): 198–227.

History of Religions , 2023

As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the com... more As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the complex relation between faith and knowledge during an era of interreligious conflict and changing political allegiances. Taking seventeenth-century Istanbul as a case study, this article examines how and why religious conflict unintentionally led to a new form of religious dialogue that stimulated knowledge exchange between Muslims and Christians. The changing nature of interreligious dialogue between Ottomans and Europeans occurred in the context of ongoing religious crises on both sides: within Muslim communities and between Western and Eastern Christianities. It argues that confessional conflict ironically helped to develop grounds for a rapprochement between Ottoman and European intellectual worlds to redefine faith beyond the textual domains of theology. Through scholarly engagements, learned Europeans began to appreciate commonality with respect to matters of faith, while also becoming gradually aware that distinct individuals of the same religion vary on the nature of true faith. Faith eventually began to be understood in its own pluralities and irreconcilable conflicts through everyday encounters in Istanbul. By comparing faiths in Islam, early modern scholars faced the paradox of their own time: the irreducibility of religious difference within any one religion. Recapturing the genealogy of the comparative approach to faith in the form of dialogue, this study sheds light on the origins of religious relativism, which is conventionally associated with the European Enlightenment.

Bevanda asiatica: Scholarly Exchange between the Ottomans and Europeans on Coffee [2021 Article Prize - Honorable Mention by the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI)]

Journal of Ottoman Studies / Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi , 2020

Focusing on Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s neglected treatise, "Bevanda asiatica" (1685), this artic... more Focusing on Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s neglected treatise, "Bevanda asiatica" (1685), this article explores knowledge exchanges between the Ottomans and Europeans in the late seventeenth century. "Bevanda asiatica" was based on Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s encyclopedic entry on coffee as well as on Marsigli’s own experiences both as a naturalist and as a slave-cook in Ottoman lands. Marsigli stated that Hezarfenn’s empirically driven depiction of the coffee plant was “the most original source” on coffee. By analyzing how and why Marsigli selected Hezarfenn’s text, this article sheds light onto the practices of cross-cultural knowledge exchanges in the early modernity.

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds

by Mackenzie Cooley, Duygu Yildirim, and Anna Toledano

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Co-edited with Anna Toledano and Duygu Yildirim. London/New York: Routledge, 2023. , 2023

The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore... more The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things—ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo—and the humans enthralled with them.　

Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade.

Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the first study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will find new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences.

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds [Introduction]

by Duygu Yildirim, Mackenzie Cooley, and Anna Toledano

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds, 2023

The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore... more The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things—ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo—and the humans enthralled with them.　

Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacific islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade.

Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the first study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will find new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003351054/natural-things-early-modern-worlds-mackenzie-cooley-anna-toledano-duygu-yıldırım?refId=b47cb2d7-0d26-4e7e-9165-1d51092afcc5&context=ubx

Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds , 2023

Abstract: What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies tha... more Abstract: What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies that consume it? This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between sense and scientific sensibility in the making of knowledge about coffee. As an iconic beverage of early modern globalization, coffee belied easy categorization. Baffled drinkers of coffee—from naturalists and physicians to merchants—tried to come up with a sufficiently expansive definition of this new and ambiguous plant from the Ottoman lands. Europeans had to rely on their senses, particularly gustatory, while creating an embodied knowledge of coffee. This sensational encounter with the Turkish drink, however, brought new anxieties to occlude the fellow feeling among coffee drinkers across religions, resulting in a differentiation of the innately melancholic Turkish body. Inter-cultural encounters of the senses around coffee thus embodied the tension between alienating the self from the object of inquiry and peering into sensations as an epistemic practice.

In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023), ed. by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, Duygu Yıldırım.

https://www.routledge.com/Natural-Things-in-Early-Modern-Worlds/Cooley/p/book/9781032397207

"Orhan Pamuk, me, and Two Men from the Seventeenth Century" – Environmental History Now

Environmental History Now, 2024

https://envhistnow.com/2024/03/12/orhan-pamuk-me-and-two-men-from-the-seventeenth-century/

Merak ve Endişe Çeperinde Kahve: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndan Avrupa’ya Bedenin Bir Tarihi

Toplumsal Tarih, 2021

“Merak ve Endişe Çeperinde Kahve: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndan Avrupa’ya Bedenin Bir Tarihi [Coffee... more

"Global Bilim Tarihi [Global History of Science]," Toplumsal Tarih, 333 (2021).

Toplumsal Tarih, 2021

Review of Natalie Rothman's "The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism" (Cornell, 2021)

EuropeNow, 2023

The age of dragomans: language and the origins of Orientalist scholarship https://www.europeno... more

Review of Helen Pfeifer's "Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands" (Princeton, 2022)

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2022

International Journal of Middle East Studies 54 (2022): 608–10.

Review of Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim's "Re Orienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters along the Silk Roads," London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

H-Sci-Med-Tech, 2022

Duygu Yıldırım. Review of Yoeli-Tlalim, Ronit. ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters alon... more

Review of Simon Mills's "A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1760" (Oxford, 2020)

Journal of Jewish Studies, 2021

Review of Elias Muhanna's "The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition," Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Nazariyat, 2018

Elias Muhanna. The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. Princeton ... more Elias Muhanna. The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. 232 pages. ISBN: 9781400887859. In the age of Wikipedia, encyclopedias seem to offer an openly editable content. Yet there was a time when ambitious individuals sought to write compendiums of universal knowledge on their own. Some of them failed because they did not live long enough to complete such enormous projects; however, one of those who succeeded was the late medieval scholar al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333). Elias Muhanna's book recounts how this scholar managed to create such an enormous compendium.

Review of Elias Muhannas's "The World in a Book" (in Turkish)

Review of "Elias Muhanna. 'The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition... more

Review of Miri Shefer-Mossensohn's "Science among the Ottomans," in 'Early Science and Medicine'

Early Science and Medicine, 2017

Book Review: "“Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, 'Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exc... more

The Making and Unmaking of Identities in the Early Modern Mediterranean Workshop

by Duygu Yildirim and Tommaso Stefini

EUI, Florence ITALY, 2022

When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dis... more When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dissolved? In the past twenty years, historiography has defined the early modern Mediterranean as a region in flux where categories of belonging and classification were continuously created, contested, and remade according to political, economical, and social circumstances. This workshop questions the trend of seeing the Mediterranean merely as a space of coexistence and fluidity and aims to foster new insights and methodological approaches to the historical studies on the early modern Mediterranean.

For Registration:

https://www.eui.eu/events?id=542914

International workshop organized by the Department of History and Civilization with the contribution of the EUI Decentering Eurocentrism Interdisciplinary Research Cluster and the Max Weber Programme.

EUI, Florence (12-13 May, 2022)

Karın Ağrısı: Yemek, Beden ve Bilim Tarihlerini Beraber Düşünmek

Akl-ı Kıssa Salı Konuşmaları (Tarih Vakfı) Karın Ağrısı: Yemek, Beden ve Bilim Tarihlerini Berab... more

Censoring Science in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Session, HSS Annual Meeting, 2021

by Jonathan Regier and Duygu Yildirim

CFP: The Making and Unmaking of Identities in the Early Modern Mediterranean

by Duygu Yildirim and Tommaso Stefini

Call For Papers: The Making and Unmaking of Identities in the Early Modern Mediterranean (EUI, 12-13 May, 2022 - Hybrid), 2022

When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dis... more When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dissolved? In the past twenty years, historiography has defined the early modern Mediterranean as a region in flux where categories of belonging and classification were continuously created, contested, and remade according to political, economical, and social circumstances. This workshop questions the trend of seeing the Mediterranean merely as a space of coexistence and fluidity and aims to foster new insights and methodological approaches to the historical studies on the early modern Mediterranean.

Shared Practices, Common Legacies: Ottoman Science from a Global Perspective

by B. Harun Küçük, Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, Assaf Tamari, Kaan Ucsu, Feray Coskun, Kostas Sarris, NUKHET VARLIK, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Duygu Yildirim, Monica Meadows, and Selim Kuru

Mid-Atlantic Ottoman Studies Workshop Program 2019

by Emin Lelić, B. Harun Küçük, Şaban Ağalar, Duygu Yildirim, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, Cornell Fleischer, Kameliya Atanasova, Ahmet Yusuf Yuksek, Burcak Ozludil, Pinar Odabasi Tasci, Ella Fratantuono, and Nikolay Antov

Book Flyer - Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds

Routledge , 2023

Cooley, Mackenzie, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım, eds. 2023. Natural Things in Early Modern W... more

Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science

Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science, 2023

Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science How do you capture the e... more Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science

How do you capture the essence of a history about monstrous squids and the shipmates who ate them, and poisonous manchineel trees? Using text to set the scene is one thing. Taking seriously the visual record left in the wake of these histories and using those elements to create something new is another. Since founding the Natural Things research group at Stanford University in 2015, we have been wrestling with the connection between design work and natural history. When it comes to premodern sources, European natural histories are some of the most lavishly illustrated texts found in the scientific oeuvre. Authors and artists often worked together to create images that would allow readers to identify plants, animals, and minerals for themselves. Our musings slipped into a question: How did premodern scholars of nature think through images, and how could we echo that process in a way intelligible to today’s readers?

https://4sonline.org/news_manager.php?page=32001

Natural Things | Ad Fontes Naturae

by Mackenzie Cooley, Duygu Yildirim, and Anna Toledano

Natural Things | Ad Fontes Naturae is a global natural history project in the digital humanities ... more Natural Things | Ad Fontes Naturae is a global natural history project in the digital humanities based out of Stanford's Program in History & Philosophy of Science. Our goal is to trace how natural objects from around the world took on new meaning over the course of the early modern period.

An edited volume titled "Natural Things: Ecologies of Knowledge in the Early Modern World" is forthcoming.