Honor, Legal Surveillance and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, ca. Late 18th- Mid 19th Centuries
Basak Tug is Assistant Professor of History at Istanbul Bilgi University. She received her PhD (2009) in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies & History from New York University and her MA in History from Bogaziçi University. Her dissertation, entitled “Politics of Honor: The Institutional and Social Frontiers of ‘Illicit’ Sex in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia” examined the legal encounters between the central government, local kadi courts, and Ottoman subjects in order to explore how specific applications of Islamic law served to construct sexuality and gender in the everyday life experiences of men and women in the mid-eighteenth century. Her study investigated the sexual and moral order established through the surveillance of sexual crime in mid-eighteenth-century Anatolia. While revising the manuscript of her book, she developed an interest in reflecting further on the continuities and rupture in modern technologies of power in Ottoman society.
During her EUME fellowship year, Tug will work on the shift in governance techniques in relation to the legal surveillance of sexuality and gender from the late early-modern period to Tanzimat.