[Bilimsel Haber] CfA: Workshop: Turquerie in the 17th & 18th Centuries

[Onur Inal]

- Call for applications -

We are delighted to announce a four-part advanced interdisciplinary
workshop at the History Department of Princeton University (November -
December, 2010):

"Turquerie: Ottoman Fashions in Europe as Intercultural Exchange, 17th
and 18th centuries"

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans of leisure played *alla
turca*: from women’s clothing and the coffee craze to Turkish-themed
operas, from novels to best-selling travel accounts and, finally, new
scholarly knowledge, men and women across Europe incorporated Ottoman
fashions into new forms of polite sociability. Although the political
fortunes of the Ottoman Empire may have waned, its cultural “soft
power” seems to have
increased over the period. Yet how this European fascination should be
interpreted has been less than obvious. This four-part workshop seeks
to investigate these trends as more than manifestations of the fickle
taste of fashionable society. Rather, we aim to establish to what
extent they bespoke a different and deeper engagement with the
cultures of the Levant.

The workshop will bring together junior and senior scholars from
diverse fields - Ottoman and European history, art history and
musicology - to approach the historical problem of *turquerie* through
many lenses. All of these disciplines will be united by a common
assumption: that the phenomenon is not solely a matter of European
representations or of the European imaginary, but should be treated as
a problem of translation. By involving scholars of both Europe and the
Ottoman Empire, we plan to emphasize the cross-cultural dimension of
*turquerie*, and to consider its manifestations as a form of
engagement with another culture (however misconstrued in translation).

The workshop will meet four times during the fall semester of 2010.
Each session will be chaired by a leading expert in the field, and
will require considerable preparatory reading on the part of all
participants.

Meetings will be held at the Princeton History Department at 4:30 p.m.
All sessions will last two hours and will be followed by a catered
reception.

Dates and session topics are as follows:

Thursday, November 18th – Music:
*Larry Wolff *(New York University) & *Karl Signell* (independent scholar)

Monday, December 6th – Visual culture:
*Perrin Stein* (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Monday, December 13th – Coffee and coffeehouses:
*Alan Mikhail* (Yale University)

Thursday, December 16th – Knowledge, formal and informal:
*Paula Fichtner* (Brooklyn College)

The workshop is open to interested scholars and graduate students. To
apply, please send a short statement of interest and a résumé to the
conveners by *Monday, September 27th, 2010*. Limited funding for
transportation to Princeton may be available; please indicate interest
in your application.

Successful applicants will be notified by Thursday, September 30th.

Conveners:

Alexander Bevilacqua – abevilac at princeton.edu

Helen Pfeifer – hpfeifer at princeton.edu

Faculty sponsors: Professors Anthony Grafton & Molly Greene

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