11/16/2023
OTSA's annual Awards Ceremony took place in Montreal on November 2.
Representing the prize committee, Efe Balıkçıoğlu (Wellesley College) presented the OTSA Undergraduate Scholarship to Ailya LeFlore, a senior majoring in International Relations and Global Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Ailya used the scholarship to support her participation in a summer internship at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center (IPS), a leading global policy think tank operating since 2001. In addition to her internship in conflict resolution and mediation under the supervision of research senior specialist Can Tülüş Türk at IPC, Ailya also improved her already advanced Turkish language skills during her time in Istanbul, Turkey.
Sarah Fischer (American University), as the chair of the OTSA Graduate Student Paper Prize Committee, presented the prize to Sertaç Kaya Şen (Brown University) for his paper "Marshaling Development: Turkish Thrace in the Interwar Years." Şen's paper is a strongly documented argument that Turkish leaders set out to define Eastern Thrace during the interwar period through a mix of diplomatic efforts, physical fortifications, population migration, and military reorganization. Şen demonstrates how, when combined, these efforts resulted in turning the formerly weakly protected region into a strong defensive line that kept Turkey and its citizens out of World War II.
Dzovinar Derderian (University of California, Berkeley), a member of the OTSA Vangelis Kechriotis Memorial Travel Grant Committee, congratulated the winner, Myrsini Manney-Kalogera (University of Arizona). Ms. Manney-Kalogera made important interventions in both Greek Studies and Ottoman Studies, and grounded her work in theories of nationalism and network theory, as well as family and household studies. The members of the prize committee were all impressed by her work.
The inaugural OTSA Digital Ottoman and Turkish Studies Award was presented by Mehmet Kuru (Sabancı University), a member of the award committee. The winner was Efe Erünal. Dr. Kuru read the following citation: "We are pleased to announce the winner of the OTSA Award for Digital Ottoman and Turkish Studies, which is sponsored by Miletos, Inc., the company behind Muteferriqa, a searchable database of Ottoman Turkish printed books, journals, and newspapers. Our selection committee comprised of Chris Gratien, Elias Kolovos, and Mehmet Kuru reviewed a number of strong applications and reached a unanimous decision to award the prize to Efe Erünal, who recently completed his Ph.D. at Koç University. Dr. Erünal's dissertation applied digital methods of analysis and visualization to an impressive range of sources concerning the economic and social transformation of the Bursa region during the 19th century. His submission for this prize proposed promising research concerning spatial, social, and cultural attributes of toponym change in Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece since the late Ottoman period as well as mapping of population and urbanization in late Ottoman Bursa using georeferenced historical maps. Dr. Erünal's work stood out for the relevance of his methods to longstanding questions in the socioeconomic history of the Ottoman Empire and its contribution to an emerging body of digital scholarship in Ottoman studies concerned with spatial analysis. We congratulate Dr. Erünal for his selection among a competitive pool of talented young scholars."
Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), the chair of the OTSA Article Prize Committee, announced that the prize for 2023 was shared by two authors.
One of the co-winners was Zeynep Devrim Gürsel for her article “Classifying the Cartozians: Rethinking the Politics of Visibility Alongside Ottoman Subjecthood and American Citizenship,” which was published in Photographies, Vol 15 (3), Fall 2022. Zeynep Gürsel’s article explores the drama of expatriation and the construction of belonging as revealed through photographs, advertisements, legal records, and news stories. This investigation begins in the Ottoman archives with a photo, and follows the route of its subjects across the globe, employing rich image analysis and ethnographic work alongside extensive digging in a variety of archives. The path of one family offers a glimpse into the pressures felt by Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire, as well as the possibilities and limitations for constructing racial identity in the US in the early 20th century. This exemplary essay is both a deeply engaging narrative of discovery and a showcase for multidisciplinary research technique.
The other co-winner was Samuel Dolbee for his article “Empire on the Edge: Desert, Nomads, and the Making of an Ottoman Provincial Border,” which was published in American Historical Review, vol. 127, no. 1 (2022), 129-158. Samuel Dolbee’s article explores the role of borders in the late Ottoman Empire, detailing the relationship between Ottoman governmental goals, local political and economic actors, and environmental realities in the desert area south of Mardin. The article highlights the role of a group that has often remained marginal in historical accounts – nomads. In this story the Shammar nomads play an outsized role, making use of political and environmental borders in ways that frustrated Ottoman reform and taxation efforts. Dolbee draws on a rich blend of primary and secondary sources in this account that is at once specialized and historically insightful while also being accessible to a wide audience and of contemporary interest.
Finally, Virginia Aksan (McMaster University), a member of the OTSA Book Prize committee, first presented an honorable mention to Andrew Hammond for his "Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought: Turkish and Egyptian Thinkers on the Disruption of Islamic Knowledge." (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Andrew Hammond’s "Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought" tells the story of three Islamic scholars who chose Cairo over Constantinople as the radical secularist agenda took hold in the emerging Turkish Republic. In addition to three substantial biographies of influential figures in the development of Turkish Islamic politics, the book contributes to a growing body of work investigating the late Ottoman Cairo-Constantinople intellectual and cultural life. Following a primer on late Ottoman Islam, the author turns to Mehmed Akif, well-known creator of the Turkish national anthem; Mustafa Sabri, last chief m***i of the Ottomans, and Mehmed Zahid Kevseri, Sabri’s deputy to the Ilmiye, all of whom wrote extensively. Akif, like Said Nursi, arguably the best known of the Republican Islamists, wrote in Turkish while Sabri and Kevseri chose to continue the use of Arabic. The remainder of the book explores the immersion of the three Ottoman Islamists in the late nineteenth century scholarly debates on Islam, from humanist to salafi, most by intellectuals much more well-known to this audience, such as Abduh, Mawdudi, Iqbal, Qutb, and Albani. True to the subtitle of the book, Turkish and Egyptian Thinkers on the Disruption of Islamic Knowledge, Hammond’s account of the debates is deeply informative and a highly engaging read.
The winner of the OTSA Book Prize for 2023 was Nilay Özok-Gündoğan with her book "The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy, and Privilege" (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). In "The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire," Dr. Özok-Gündoğan provides an empirically well-grounded and theoretically robust analysis of the transformation of Kurdish landed elites in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, with a specific focus on the case of Palu. The book begins by meticulously exploring the hereditary economic and political privileges granted by the Ottoman state to the Kurdish elite in the sixteenth century. Subsequently, it delves into two major transformations that profoundly influenced class, ethnicity, and central-local relations in Palu. As Özok-Gündoğan shows, the first transformation occurred in the 1720s and 1730s when the Ottoman state increased control over the Keban and Ergani mines, fragmenting the Kurdish elites’ control over land. The more significant transformation took place in the nineteenth century. Concurrent with the Ottoman state’s efforts to undermine the Kurdish elites and the empire-wide transition toward private landownership, the state confiscated the local elites’ lands after the Weşin Massacre of 1848, facilitating their sale in the market. This shift from hereditary control to private property set in motion a series of events that had far-reaching consequences, profoundly impacting local class and ethnic relations. Armenian and Kurdish sharecroppers began challenging their landlords. Local Armenians, connected to the Armenian financial bourgeoisie of Istanbul, sought legal ownership of these lands, leading to intense conflicts with the Kurdish elites, who defended their hereditary privileges, culminating in the 1895 massacres of local Armenians. Dr. Özok-Gündoğan’s book offers a compelling analysis of the political economy of class, ethnic, and state-society relations in Ottoman Kurdistan. More importantly, by connecting empirical findings with theoretical concepts such as autonomy, nobility, and feudalism and challenging the conventional divide between the Ottomans and European empires, Özok-Gündoğan highlights the Ottoman Empire’s relevance to longstanding debates on feudalism and nobility in comparative-historical analyses of empires.
