[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: Constantinople/Istanbul, 28-29 September, 2007 (Washington DC)

[Onur Inal]

Call for Papers: Constantinople/Istanbul

Constantinople/Istanbul: Destination, Way-Station, City of Renegades A
Fall Faculty Weekend Seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library 
Washington, DC
28-29 September, 2007
Application Deadline: 4 June 2007 for admission and grants-in-aid for
Folger Institute affiliates.
For application guidelines and a link to the online application form,
visit: www.folger.edu/institute
For questions, contact:
institute at folger.edu


In 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and refashioned the
depopulated city into an imperial capital that would endure until the
empire was dismembered after World War I. The passing of the city of
Constantine into Muslim hands was constructed as a disaster for
Christendom on one hand and as a divine endorsement of Ottoman
sovereignty on the other. That division has retained much of its primacy
in the historiography of the Afro-Eurasian world. Yet the designations
"Christendom" and "Islam" are inadequate; they fail to convey the
multilayered nature of early modern visions of Constantinople and the
Eurasian space in which it was embedded.

The Ottoman empire, after all, was European and Christian as well as
Asian and Muslim. Constantinople was one pole in the circuits of travel
and trade which linked Venice (by sea) and Vienna (by land) to points
east and to the sites of "classical" history and pilgrimage. The
sultan's abode was also a city of renegades (entrepreneurs, warriors,
captives, artisans), a place where hierarchies of identity (status,
ethnicity, religion, and gender) were sorted and realigned. The citizens
of (and visitors to) Constantinople participated in a Mediterranean
culture of artistry, poetics, sexuality, and consumption that stretched
from the Atlantic world to the spiritual, commercial, and intellectual
emporia of India, Persia, Arabia, and Palestine.

One of a series of offerings on "Early Modern Cities," this seminar will
explore aspects of those connections, visions, identities, and rhetorics
of representation. It will gather a dozen faculty participants for
interdisciplinary conversations that will be framed by a set of shared
advance readings and the participants' own research projects.

Director: Palmira Brummett is Professor of History and Distinguished
Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. Her work
involves the intersections of rhetoric and "reality" in the early modern
Afro-Eurasian world. She is currently editing The Book of Travels:
Genre, Itinerary, Ethnology and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700 and completing a
monograph on Mapping Ottoman Space.

More info:
http://www.folger.edu/institute