From its inception, this seminar adopted an interdisciplinary approach to Turkic studies, and its members represent many fields. At the same time, their interests span more than twelve centuries. In most years, the program covers a selection of topics reflecting current research of members. Special anniversaries such as the Atatürk centennial (1981–1982), the sixtieth anniversary of the Turkish Republic (1983–1984), and the traveling exhibition, The Age of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1987–1988), however, have provided themes around which all papers or a series of papers have been centered. Discussion on papers presented—no matter what their topic—has shown that dialogue between, for example, political scientist and art historian, medievalist and modernist, can be both stimulating and productive.
11/17/2016 Christine Philliou, UC Berkeley, on “‘This, too, is a kind of pleasure:’ Writing and Repression in the Second Constitutional Period”
Christine Philliou is Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She works on the final century of Ottoman History and the emergence of post-Ottoman regimes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her book, Biography of an Empire, dealt with the crisis and transformation in Ottoman governance in the first half of the nineteenth century as seen through the eyes of the Phanariots, an Orthodox Christian elite of Ottoman functionaries. Her current project moves to the early-mid twentieth century and takes up questions about the relationship between politics and literature in the process of Ottoman devolution and Turkish republican state-building.
