Erik Aldritch Charlemagne Blackthorne-O'Barr

Erik Blackthorne-O’Barr is a doctoral candidate at the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department at Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he completed a Master’s in Turkish Studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul and a Bachelor’s degree in the Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations department at the University of Toronto. He is currently writing his dissertation entitled “Persian Letters: Language, Politics, and Desire in the Late Ottoman Empire,” which examines how the notion of Persophilia or Iranian influence structured the project of Turkish language reform during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the co-editor of Levantines of the Ottoman World: Communities, Identities, and Cultures (Ibn Haldun University Press, 2024) and his work has been published in Kadim Dergisi (2021), the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021, 2022), and Culture, Theory and Critique (2024).