History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise
36 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago - ★★★★ - 13 ratingsan Ottoman History Podcast Series
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Episodes
The Natural Sciences in Early Modern Morocco
December 14, 2022 20:51with Justin Stearns hosted by Shireen Hamza and Taylor Moore | When you think of the history of science, what people and places come to mind? Scientific knowledge production flourished in early modern Morocco, and not in the places you might expect. This episode transports us into the intellectual and social worlds of Sufi lodges (zawāya) in seventeenth-century Morocco. Our guest, Justin Stearns, guides us through scholarly and educational landscapes far removed from the imperial urban...
Shipping and Empire around the Arabian Peninsula, Part 2
December 03, 2022 19:11with Laleh Khalili hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did massive, modern shipping ports emerge from the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, and what they teach us about our present forms of global exchange? Combining historical research with site visits that included multiple voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, our guest Laleh Khalili sheds light on these questions in this two-part series on shipping and empire around the Arabian Peninsula. Through her investigation of the entangled real...
Shipping and Empire around the Arabian Peninsula
October 01, 2022 15:06with Laleh Khalili hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did massive, modern shipping ports emerge from the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, and what they teach us about our present forms of global exchange? Combining historical research with site visits that included multiple voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, our guest Laleh Khalili sheds light on these questions in this two-part series on shipping and empire around the Arabian Peninsula. Through her investigation of the entangled real...
Islam and Science Fiction
February 13, 2022 17:12with Jörg Matthias Determann hosted by Shireen Hamza | Islam and science fiction have more history together than you might expect. In this episode, we speak with Jörg Matthias Determann about the many ways science has fueled the imagination of people in Muslim-majority contexts over the last few hundred years. In his latest book, he shows how artists and missionaries participated in "cultures of astrobiology," or the study of life on other planets. Exploring the ways that a variety of ...
Science in Early Modern Istanbul
March 25, 2020 17:36Episode 456 with Harun Küçük hosted by Sam Dolbee and Zoe Griffith What did science look like in early modern Istanbul? In this episode, Harun Küçük discusses his new book, Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732 (University of Pittsburgh Press), which tackles this question in a bold fashion. Tracing the impact of late seventeenth and early eighteenth transformations of the Ottoman economy, Küçük argues that the material conditions of scholars greatly det...
Plague in the Ottoman World
March 19, 2020 15:37Episode 455 featuring Nükhet Varlık, Yaron Ayalon, Orhan Pamuk, Lori Jones, Valentina Pugliano, and Edna Bonhomme narrated by Chris Gratien and Maryam Patton with contributions by Nir Shafir, Sam Dolbee, Tunç Şen, and Andreas Guidi The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis, which lives in fleas that in turn live on rodents. Coronavirus is not the plague. Nonetheless, we can find many parallels between the current pandemic and the experience of plague for people who l...
The Arab Conquest of Space
October 25, 2019 20:33Episode 431 with Jörg Matthias Determann hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud When Sultan bin Salman left Earth on the shuttle Discovery in 1985, he became the first Arab, first Muslim, and first member of a royal family in space. Twenty-five years later, the discovery of a planet 500 light years away by the Qatar Exoplanet Survey – subsequently named ‘Qatar-1b’ – was evidence of the cutting-edge space science projects taking place across...
Making Environmental Subjects on the Egyptian Nile
April 03, 2019 00:27Episode 408 with Jennifer Derr hosted by Edna Bonhomme Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Colonialism and violence are frequently paired in studies of the modern Middle East, but environment and violence are less commonly paired. But in this episode, Jennifer Derr explains the indelible connection between the two in a conversation about her recent monograph The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt. According to Derr, the tran...
Status Quo Utopias in the UAE
March 11, 2019 15:49Episode 405 with Gökçe Günel hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud About half-hour's drive from Abu Dhabi sits Masdar City, a clean technology and renewable energy business cluster and research institute. Founded in 2006, Masdar imagines a sustainable and business-savvy future where technology, ecology, and humanity co-exist and thrive, even in the oil-rich deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. In this episode we speak with Gökçe Günel, wh...
Forging Islamic Science
February 02, 2019 13:42Episode 400 with Nir Shafir hosted by Suzie Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Nir Shafir talks about the problem of "fake minatures" of Islamic science: small paintings that look old, but are actually contemporary productions. As these images circulate in museums, on book covers, and on the internet, they tell us more about what we want "Islamic science" to be than what it actually was. That, Nir tells us, is a lost opportunity. « ...
Medicine and Muslim Modernity in China
July 01, 2018 21:22Episode 365 with John Chen hosted by Shireen Hamza and Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In the early twentieth century, Muslim modernizers all over the world were making new claims about Islam, and the Muslims of China were no exception. In this episode, we discuss the relationship of Southeast Asia to the emergence of a modern Chinese Islam. In a period often characterized in terms of non-Arab Muslims' rediscovery of the Middle East, John Chen sh...
Genetics and Nation-Building in the Middle East
July 15, 2017 14:54Episode 324 with Elise Burton hosted by Shireen Hamza, Chris Gratien, and Maryam Patton Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Genetics have emerged as a new scientific tool for studying human ancestry and historical migration. And as research into the history of genetics demonstrates, genetics and other bioscientific approaches to studying ancestry were also integral to the transformation of the very national and racial categories through which ancestry has come...
Beekeeping in Late Ottoman Palestine
June 19, 2017 17:51Episode 317 with Tamar Novick hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The history of late Ottoman Palestine and the changes in settlement, agriculture, economy and politics that occurred there remain a subject of great interest for historians of the Middle East. In this episode, our guest Tamar Novick introduces a new approach to that history using the lens of ecology. We explore changes in late Ottoman Palestine through enivoronment and ...
Late Ottoman Translations of Ibn Khaldun
June 15, 2017 18:09Episode 316 with Kenan Tekin hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Among the many important medieval texts written in Arabic, few have received more attention from scholars in Europe than The Muqaddimah, an introduction to history by the 14th-century North African writer Ibn Khaldun. In this episode, we explore another of arena for reception of Ibn Khaldun, the Ottoman Empire, with our guest Kenan Tekin. We examine Ottoman translations of ...
The Politics of News in Colonial Algeria
January 23, 2017 05:23Episode 295 with Arthur Asseraf hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud We often assume that as we become increasingly connected to ever larger networks of information and news we become part of larger and more cohesive polities. In this episode, Arthur Asseraf discusses how the introduction of new networks of communication in colonial Algeria generated friction and unevenness instead of expansive flows. Looking at telegraphs, newspapers, cinem...
Islam, Psychoanalysis, and the Arabic Freud
January 08, 2017 05:24Episode 291 with Omnia El Shakry hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud A tale of mutual ignorance between psychoanalysis and Islam has obscured the many creative and co-constitutive encounters between these two traditions of thought, both so prominent in the 20th century. This presumed incommensurability has hardened the lines between the "modern subject," assumed to be secular and Western, and its Others, often associated with Islam o...
The Pasteur Institute and its Global Network
December 04, 2016 21:26with Anne Marie Moulin hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur and his disciples promoted a laboratory-based study of disease and contagion that led to what many call "the bacteriological turn" and reshaped public health in France and beyond. In this episode, we sit down with doctor, philosopher, and historian Anne Marie Moulin to talk about the history of the Pastorians and the early establishment ...
Compiling Knowledge in the Medieval Islamic World
November 16, 2016 15:27with Elias Muhanna hosted by Chris Gratien and Zoe Griffith readings by Nora Lessersohn Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Classical encyclopedias and compendia such as Pliny’s Natural History have long been known to Western audiences, but the considerably more recent works of medieval Islamic scholars have been comparatively ignored. In this episode, we talk to Elias Muhanna about his new translation of a fourteenth-century Arabic compendium by Egyptian schol...
Nouveau Literacy in the 18th Century Levant
November 11, 2016 22:53with Dana Sajdi hosted by Chris Gratien and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In the conventional telling of the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamicate world, there has been very little room for people outside the ranks of the learned scholars or ulema associated with the religious, intellectual, and political elite of Muslim communities. But in this episode, we explore the writings of Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, an 18t...
Tracing Plague in the Ottoman Empire
July 28, 2016 21:17with Nükhet Varlık hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | SoundCloud Geneticists and historians are generally considered strange bedfellows. However, new advances in bio-archaeology and genetics are facilitating this odd coupling. In this episode, we speak to Nükhet Varlık, author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World : the Ottoman experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge University Press), about how genetic evidence has transformed the study of the pla...
Ottoman Commentaries on Islamic Philosophy
July 26, 2016 21:01with Eric van Lit hosted by Nir Shafir and Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | SoundCloud Commentaries are a common, even a nearly ineluctable, part of the textual landscape of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Especially when it came to philosophy, commentaries were perhaps the main venue of discussions. An earlier generation of scholars believed these commentaries to be derivative but we now see them as a major piece in the development of the philosophical tradition in t...
Bobovius and the Republic of Letters
July 24, 2016 08:02with Michael Tworek hosted by Nir Shafir, Polina Ivanova, and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud A man known as Wojciech Bobowski to some, Albertus Bobovius to others, and Ali Ufki to yet others, is one of the prime examples of an early modern intermediary operating in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, we discuss with Michael Tworek the fascinating figure of the Bobovius, from his childhood in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwea...
A New History of Print in Ottoman Cairo
July 15, 2016 10:02with Kathryn Schwartz hosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud We often regard print as a motor of social change, leaving revolutions in its wake, whether political and religious. For historians of the Middle East, this line of thought always leads to the (predictable) question: why didn’t Muslims or Ottomans or Arabs adopt print? In this episode, Kathryn Schwartz discusses why this question is often poorly posed and then delves into an in-depth ...
Literacies and the Emergence of Modern Egypt
July 11, 2016 11:23with Hoda Yousef hosted by Graham Pitts Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late nineteenth century, Egyptian society witnessed the rise of new debates and practices concerning reading and writing in the Arabic language. In this episode, Hoda Yousef explores the discources surrounding literacy in Egypt, which is the subject of her first book entitled Composing Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016). This work examines how different actors from Islami...
Venetian Physicians in the Ottoman Empire
March 18, 2016 16:01with Valentina Pugliano hosted by Nir Shafir This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires. These doctors treated not only Venetian consular officials, but also local artisans and rulers. In this podcast, Va...
Experimenting with Plague in 18th Century Egypt
February 20, 2016 17:47with Edna Bonhomme hosted by Chris Gratien Edna Bonhomme updates us on the progress of her research concerning the history of plague in North Africa. This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud As research on the early modern period increasingly shows, bubonic plague played a formative role in the making of state policies and medical practice, and concern over plague create...
Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe
January 30, 2016 19:55with Ayesha Ramachandran hosted by Chris Gratien This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud We often speak of physical and abstract worlds as if they were self-evident. But the concept of "the world" has been forged and continually remade through imagination and debate. In this podcast, Ayesha Ramachandran discusses the historical context of the world's ascendance as ...
Mapping the Ottomans
January 24, 2016 01:07with Palmira Brummett hosted by Chris Gratien In a new episode, we speak to Palmira Brummett about her new book, which examines the mapping and representation of Ottoman space in early modern Europe. This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Where did the Ottomans fit within the geographical understandings of Christian kingdoms in early modern Europe? How did ...
Mapping the Medieval World in Islamic Cartography
January 13, 2016 00:39with Karen Pinto hosted by Nir Shafir In the latest addition to our series on history of science, Nir Shafir talks to Karen Pinto about her research on Islamic cartography and mapping. This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Hundreds of cartographic images of the world and its regions exist scattered throughout collections of medieval and early modern Arabic, Persia...
Sexology in Hebrew and Arabic
August 19, 2015 06:00with Liat Kozma hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Chris Gratien Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientists and physicians the world over began to think of sex as something that could be studied and understood through rational methods. In places like Germany, these sexologists were associated with progressive political movements that combated stigmatization of homosexuality and contraception and broke taboos re...
Islamic Hospitals in Medieval Egypt and the Levant
July 25, 2015 09:49with Ahmed Ragab hosted by Nir Shafir This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud From Baghdad to Cairo to Edirne, hospitals were major and integral components of medieval and early modern Islamic cities. But what role did they play in these cities and their societies? Were they sites for the development of medical knowledge? In this podcast, Professor Ahmed Ragab examin...
Astronomy and Islam in late Ottoman Egypt
August 10, 2014 08:42with Daniel Stolz hosted by Nir Shafir The movements of celestial bodies had long been of tremendous importance within the social and religious spheres throughout the Muslim world. As new understandings of space and time began to emerge during the nineteenth century, longstanding astronomical practices in places such as Egypt witnessed a profound transformation. In this episode, Daniel Stolz discusses the importance of astronomy in nineteenth-century Egypt and the overlapping scientific t...
Osmanlı'da Mecnun Olmak
June 12, 2014 22:19Fatih Artvinli This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud Yüzyıllar boyunca Tanrı’nın kimi zaman gizemi kimi zaman gazabı varsayılan delilik ve deliler, ondokuzuncu yüzyıl modernleşme düşüncesi ve pratikleri ile tıbbın ve psikiyatrinin temel konusu oldu. Deliliğin modern anlamda biyolojik nedenleri icat ve mekanları inşa edildi. Tanzimat’la beraber, tıbbi pratikler ve kamu sağlığı...
Time and Temporal Culture in the Ottoman Empire
May 08, 2014 19:01with Avner Wishnitzer hosted by Chris Gratien In daily life, time appears as an unavoidable fact. It marches forward uniformly, and much like money, is a fungible commodity that can be spent, wasted, and saved. However, this view often obscures the fact that our engagement with time is mitigated through socially-constructed ways of understanding, measuring, and using time. In this episode, Chris Gratien talks to Anver Wishnizter about his research in this realm of social time--what ...
Darwin in Arabic
January 08, 2014 15:48with Marwa Elshakry hosted by Chris Gratien Historians have begun to explore the paradox of the identification of a would-be universal form of rational knowledge known as science with the particular historical experience of Europe. This begs the question: how have new forms of scientific knowledge been translated, received, assimilated, and engaged outside of the cultural contexts within which they were produced? In this episode, Marwa Elshakry examines the case of Arab engagement with an...
Traveling Oculists in Israel/Palestine
December 28, 2013 06:06with Anat Mooreville hosted by Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise. Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Medicine is not merely a practice that takes place in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. It also involves the movement and operation of medical practitioners in different social spaces. In this episode, Anat Mooreville discusses traveling doctors in Israel/Palesti...