This presentation examines representations of female criminality in Turkish literature and the press between 1870 and 1935, offering a comparative analysis of how journalistic and literary narratives constructed meanings around women, crime, and social deviance during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. The study explores how newspapers and selected novels portrayed women accused of, associated with, or imagined with criminal acts through feminist criminology, gender studies, and narrative analysis. The study approaches them as cultural sites where gendered understandings of crime were produced and contested rather than treating these texts as mere reflections of social reality. Through a comparison of crime reports and fictional narratives, it investigates how female offenders were framed in relation to dominant ideals of femininity, morality, sexuality, family, and citizenship. While newspaper accounts often relied on sensationalist and moralizing tropes that emphasized women’s transgressions of gender norms, literary texts frequently provided more nuanced depictions of women’s motivations, social circumstances, and experiences of marginalization. The comparative perspective highlights both convergences and divergences between journalistic and literary discourses. Across both genres, female criminality served as a lens through which broader overlapping concepts about modernization, social change, and shifting gendered criminality were articulated. This paper demonstrates how narratives of women’s criminality contributed to the construction and policing of gender boundaries in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey by bringing together crime reports in the press and literary sources.
Gizem Sivri is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS) at Freie Universität Berlin and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University. She completed her doctoral dissertation at the Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, in January 2022. Her dissertation examines the living conditions of women's prisons and the incarceration of female prisoners in the late Ottoman Empire (1840–1922). Following the completion of her doctorate, she held an LMU-UCB Postdoctoral Research Grant in the Humanities and served as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 2022). She subsequently conducted research at Stanford University's Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies as part of her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (2023–2025). Her current postdoctoral research examines the identification and representation of Ottoman female perpetrators and the narratives surrounding women's criminal cases in late Ottoman and early Republican literature and the press, while she is simultaneously preparing her dissertation for publication as a monograph. She has taught at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, the University of California Berkeley, and Stanford University during her career.
Nazan Maksudyan is a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in the ERC Starting Grant Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1922 (EP/X032833/1) and a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with a strong commitment to global historical approaches. Her work foregrounds marginalized and minoritized actors – such as orphans, non-Muslims, the Deaf, exiles, politically persecuted individuals – whose experiences illuminate broader structures of power, political violence, and racialized difference. She is the author of Türklüğü Ölçmek (Metis, 2005), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse UP, 2014); Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (Syracuse UP, 2019); Lives in Fragments: Self-Narrative Sources and Biographical Approaches to the Armenian Genocide (ed. with Eren Yetkin, Adnan Çelik, Berghahn, 2026). She is an Editorial Board Member of Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of European Studies, and First World War Studies. Nazan was a EUME Fellow in 2009/2010.
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