EUME Summer Academy
Sun 21 Sep 2008 – Sun 28 Sep 2008

Living together: Plurality and Cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond

In cooperation with the Aga Khan University Institute

Ottoman Bank Museum, Istanbul

Please find here the program, the schedule of the Summer Academy and the original call for applications.

The Summer Academy intended to relate these debates on cosmopolitanism and similar notions to the historical experiences of cities in the Ottoman Empire, its successor and its neighbouring states - in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arab and Muslim World. How did people of different cultural, ethnic, social and religious backgrounds live together in these cities? How are such examples of conviviality, conflict, migration, urban regimes of governance and stratification imagined and conceptualized? How were plural social relations organized and translated into space and material culture? To which degree were social groups of different strata and regional settings part of a 'cosmos' of interacting, interconnected and competing ideas and knowledge systems? What is the role of local agency? Social History, and questions of spatial organisation, local agencies and vernacular modernities that emerge from scholarship on the cities of the Ottoman Empire and adjunct regions may offer perspectives of a cosmopolitanism "from below" that can contribute to contemporary debates and conceptions of the city, civil society, multicultural societies, migration, or cosmopolitanism.

The Summer Academy was chaired by a group of scholars: Professor Asef Bayat (ISIM), Professor Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul), Professor Ulrike Freitag (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), Dr. Nora Lafi (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), Dr. Stefan Weber (Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London), and Dr. Modjtaba Sadria (Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London).

Twenty-four young scholars from different academic disciplines, from Europe, the Arab World and the United States were given the opportunity to present and discuss their current research on cities, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.

Participants:

Dilek Akyalcin Kaya (EHESS, Paris)
Sabbatians in Salonica in the late Nineteenth Century
Metin Atmaca (University of Texas Austin / Istanbul)
Conflict and Diversity on the Ottoman-Iranian Frontier: The Baban Family and Sulaymaniyah in 19th-Century Ottoman Iraq
Asef Bayat (ISIM)
Ralph Bodenstein (DAI, Cairo)
Studying Domestic Architecture in the Context of Plural Urban Societies: The Cases of Beirut and Cairo in the late-Ottoman Period
Michelle Campos (University of Florida, Gainesville)
Urban Space, Economy and Social Networks in late 19th Century Jerusalem: Relations among and Boundaries between Religious Communities in a Pre-Nationalist Moment
Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul)
Mohamed Elshahed (NYU)
Cosmopolitanism and Plurality of Narratives in Modern Cairo
Merih Erol (Boğaziçi University)
The Cultural Identifications of the Ottoman Greeks. Discourse on Music in the 19th and early 20th Century
Ulrike Freitag (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin)
Magdi Guirguis (University of Cairo)
The Ethnic and Cultural Multiplicity of Ottoman Cairo - The Icon Painters in 18th Century
Will Hanley (Florida State University)
Vulgar Cosmopolitanism
Onur Inal (University of Arizona/ Istanbul)
Women’s Fashions in Transition: Ottoman Borderlands and the Anglo-Ottoman Exchange of Costumes
Abigail Jacobson (University of Tel Aviv)
Living Together in War: Jerusalem during World War I
Miloš Jovanović (Central European University)
Erasing Ottoman Heritage: The Reconstruction of  Belgrade's Urban Landscape between 1830 and 1878
Elektra Kostopoulou (Boğaziçi University)
Westernizing the East and Easternizing the West in 19th Century Crete: A story of Cosmopolitanism?
Feras Krimsti (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences)
Living together in Aleppo: Questions on Cosmopolitanism through the Christian Communities in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Towards an Evaluation of the Private Archives of the Aleppan Churches
Nora Lafi (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin)
Jessica Marglin (Princeton University)
The Socio-Legal History of Jewish-Muslim Relations in Morocco, 1792-1912
Adam Mestyan (Central European University Budapest)
Opera and Politics in the Eastern Mediterranean (1867-1914)
Amy Mills (University of South Carolina)
Cultural Memories of Cosmopolitanism in Urban Spaces and Landscapes of Istanbul
Sara Ellinor Morack (Freie Universität Berlin)
Izmir as a Post-Cosmopolitan City: Struggles over Emval-ı metruke- Property Distribution between Refugees and Local Muslims in early Republican Izmir, 1923-1926
Ayse Ozil ( Birkbeck College, London/ Istanbul)
The Structure of Community: Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire in Northwestern Asia Minor, c.1860-1910
Marios Papakyriacou (Universtiy of Crete / FU Berlin)
Being a Greek in Colonial Egypt. Greek Migrants in Egypt from the mid-19th until the Beginning of the 20th Century
Paris Papamichos- Chronakis (University of Crete)
A Middle Class in Transition - The Greek Orthodox and Jewish Merchants of Salonica, 1908-1922
Mohammad Sabri al Dali (Helwan University)
Pre-colonialism -Europeans in the Ottoman Alexandria - Coexistence and Discords
Modjtaba Sadria (Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London)
Christian Sassmannshausen (Freie Universität Berlin)
Approaching Modernity: Family, Networks, and Social Distinction in Late Ottoman Tripoli, 1860-1914
Zeynep Turkyilmaz (UCLA / Istanbul)
Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the late Ottoman Empire
Stefan Weber (Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London)
Selma Zecevic (York University, Toronto)
Walking Judges, Sitting Muftis, Traveling Fetvas: Applying Ottoman Shari’a Law in the Republic of Dubrovnik
Special participants of the Summer Academy include Professor Dick Douwes (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Lorans Tanatar Baruh (Ottoman Bank Museum), Dr. Alp Yucel Kaya (Boğaziçi University), Dr. Cengis Kirlı (Boğaziçi University), Dr. Yucel Terzibašoğlu (Boğaziçi University), Vangelis Kechriotis (Boğaziçi University), Richard Wittmann (German Orient Institute, Istanbul).

Please find a list of the participants in a PDF format and the original Call for applications here.

Institutional Framework

The Summer Academy is supported within the overall framework of 'Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe', a research program of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, which focuses on the diverse processes of transfer, exchange and interaction between Europe and the Middle East. The Summer Academy is funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Aga Khan University Institute. It is organized in cooperation with the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, the Department of History of Boğaziçi University, the Ottoman Bank Museum, the German Orient-Institute Istanbul, the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, and the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM).

For further information on the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations of the Aga Khan University please visit: www.aku.edu/ISMC/.

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