Papers by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina, 2023
The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg d... more The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of Austria-Hungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular explores the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire during this period—an influence perpetuated by the efforts of the imperial state from afar, and by its former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina negotiating their new geopolitical reality. Muslims' endeavors to maintain their prominence and shape their organizations and institutions influenced imperial considerations and policies on occupation, sovereignty, minorities, and migration.
This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.
https://www-sup.stanford.edu/books/title/?id=33140
New Lines Magazine, 2023
In the war’s aftermath, demographic engineering and large-scale population transfers brought grea... more In the war’s aftermath, demographic engineering and large-scale population transfers brought great suffering while cementing the idea of the nation-state
Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period, 2022
Analyzing Ottoman, Turkish, and Yugoslav sources, this chapter examines how the Kingdom of Yugosl... more Analyzing Ottoman, Turkish, and Yugoslav sources, this chapter examines how the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Turkish Republic understood migration of Muslims as a practical part of their postwar nation and state-building processes, culminating in an officially sanctioned population transfer. Consideration of demographics permeated both states’ nation-building projects. Having acquired new territories in World War I, Serbian-led Yugoslavia wanted to rid itself of ethnically diverse Muslims in its south Turkey saw a need for boosting population for economic, political, and security reasons. Muslim identity played a key factor in categorizing moveable populations, undesirable for Yugoslavia and preferred by Turkey.
The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History, 2020
The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History
By John R. Lampe, Ulf Brunnbauer
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2017
The Habsburg takeover of Ottoman Bosnia Herzegovina (1878-1918) is conventionally considered the ... more The Habsburg takeover of Ottoman Bosnia Herzegovina (1878-1918) is conventionally considered the entry of this province into the European realm and the onset of its modernization. Treating the transition from one empire to another not as a radical break, but as in many respects continuity, reveals that the imperial context provided for the existence of overlapping affiliations that shaped the means by which modernity was mediated and embodied in the local experience. Drawing on Bosnian and Ottoman sources, this article analyzes Bosnian intellectuals' conceptions of their particular Muslim modernity in a European context. It comparatively evaluates the ways in which they integrated the modernist discourse that developed in the Ottoman Empire and the broader Muslim world, and how they also contributed to that discourse. I show that their concern with modernity was not abstract but rather focused on concrete solutions that the Muslim modernists developed to challenges in transforming their societies. I argue that we must incorporate Islamic intellectual history, and cross-regional exchanges within it, to understand southeastern Europe's past and present, and that studies of Europe and the Middle East need to look beyond geohistorical and disciplinary divisions.
Nationalities Papers, 2019
This article discusses the ways in which the spread and the overwhelming popularity of Turkish te... more This article discusses the ways in which the spread and the overwhelming popularity of Turkish television series in Southeastern Europe influence the change in perception of Turks and Turkey, as well as how the serials are transforming the image of the Balkans and the Ottoman legacy in Turkey. Television serials significantly contributed to the shifting popular image of the "other," and initiated interactions unimaginable even a decade ago. These exchanges are both following and encouraging the breakdown of geohistorical boundaries that were set by the nationalist narratives in these regions at the turn of the 20th century, toward a more nuanced understanding of a shared past and a postnational future.
Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 2018
Visual Sources of Late Ottoman History
Leyla Amzi-Erdoǧdular and Zeynep Çelik
This collection ... more Visual Sources of Late Ottoman History
Leyla Amzi-Erdoǧdular and Zeynep Çelik
This collection of articles examines and problematizes the use of visual sources in writing histories of the of late Ottoman period. The time bracket defined by the mid-nineteenth century and World War I corresponds to an explosion of visual documentation, extending from cartography to, of course, photography. Developments in the print world increasingly capitalized on them. As images became more and more accessible, they were integrated in myriad ways into the historical narrative regardless of the subject—political, cultural, social, environmental, urban, artistic, architectural, and even economic. Nevertheless, the current interpretations often tend to ignore visual documents or reduce them to decorative backgrounds—as light distractions from the serious textual research, and as opposed to their central use in art and architectural history. Based on the presentations at a conference under the same title we organized as part of the Columbia University Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies in May 2017, a group of emerging historians discuss here their methodological experiments with visual documents. They investigate their potential to reveal historical information and insights hidden from or neglected by the textual ones, without merely replacing historians’ notorious textual archival fetishism with one for visuals. They use the latest technological tools to scrutinize the representations in micro and macro scales, contributing to the emergent field of Ottoman digital humanities. To this end, they identify key methodological issues in the use of visual documents in an interdisciplinary, experimental, flexible, and open-ended manner. The questions the contributors raise include: How do academic disciplines interact with each other and learn from each other? How can a good balance be maintained in synthesizing seemingly incompatible sources? How elastic are the methodologies adopted, and how far can their elasticity be taken? Several overarching themes emerge from the discussions, including reading the absences, understanding the urge to find effective ways of conveying knowledge, and rebuilding the architectural past. Nevertheless, these are not rigid categories with fixed boundaries as there is a great deal of overlap and slippage between them. The first two articles complicate their stories by reading the absences as they go back and forth between visual and written sources. Mehmet Kentel studies an album by caricaturist Yusuf Franko, who opens a surprising insider’s perspective to the esteemed cosmopolitan milieu of late nineteenth-century Pera. In Franko’s cartoons he discovers forms of self-criticism that written sources of the period would not expose. Furthermore, he complements Franko’s stories by portraying this community from other sources to trace who and what are missing from the repertory of the drawings. Michael Talbot shows that sometimes visuals not only spotlight written sources’ absentees, but question the original intensions. By zooming into photographs of late Ottoman Jerusalem and micro-reading the faces, bodies, and physical gestures of the individuals in the crowds depicted in the frames, he recovers the experience of watching and listening to a provincial Ottoman military band. He discovers through the photographs of independent studios that, contrary to reports in pro-government press of the period, street performances of the Ottoman military band were not the best show in town. However, Talbot’s conclusions do translate to Ottoman state’s failure to take advantage of the power of the visual media. The other three articles shift the perspective from moveable objects, frozen by the painter’s brush or camera lens to spaces. Burçak Özlüdil Altın and Dotan Halevy show different ways in which modern states shaped the late Ottoman landscape. They rebuild the architectural past. Özlüdil Altın traces the architectural transformation of an Ottoman külliye into an asylum for the mentally ill. By recovering the interventions through plans and photographs, she links architectural repurposing to the spatial embodiment of modern psychiatry in the late Ottoman Empire. Halevy probes the British manipulation of historical monuments in Mandatory Palestine. He investigates the Mandatory government’s preservation of the “Tower of Ramleh” and the later reincarnations of its image in proposing an argument on British efforts to eliminate “Ottoman ruins” from the landscape of Palestine. Finally, Zeinab Azarbadegan investigates the production of knowledge in history, geography, and archaeology in Ottoman Iraq to contribute to Iranian identity during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign (1848–96). She analyzes Qajar geographical texts, maps, travelogues, and photographs to argue that the Qajars capitalized on the new technologies of rule, utilized by colonial European empires. Azarbadegan concludes that non-European empires participated actively in modern technologies to assert sovereignty.
Acknowledgements: We express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University Newark. ([email protected]) Zeynep Çelik is a distinguished professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Federated Department of History at the NJIT and Rutgers University Newark. ([email protected])
Talks by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
Mediterranean Displacements Lecture Series , 2020
This talk discusses Muslim migration and its role in nation building at the turn of the twentieth... more This talk discusses Muslim migration and its role in nation building at the turn of the twentieth century. It considers the persistence of population movements and categories such as minorities as integral to the modern conceptualization of state and nation in southeastern Europe and the Middle East.
Ottoman History Podcast, 2017
Visual sources such as photographs, maps, and miniatures often serve as accompaniment or adornmen... more Visual sources such as photographs, maps, and miniatures often serve as accompaniment or adornment within works of Ottoman history. In this episode, we feature new work that interrogates methods of analyzing and employing visual sources for Ottoman history that go beyond the practice of "image as decoration." Following a conversation with the organizers of the "Visual Sources in Late Ottoman History" conference held at Columbia University in April 2017, we speak to conference participants about the visual sources they employ in their work and how these visual sources allow us to understand the history of the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman world in a new light.
Ottoman History Podcast, 2015
Book Reviews by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
Southeastern Europe, 2024
https://brill.com/view/journals/seeu/48/1/article-p153_009.xml
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East , 2021
Books by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
Intro - Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims In Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina, 2023
The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg d... more The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of Austria-Hungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular explores the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire during this period—an influence perpetuated by the efforts of the imperial state from afar, and by its former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina negotiating their new geopolitical reality. Muslims' endeavors to maintain their prominence and shape their organizations and institutions influenced imperial considerations and policies on occupation, sovereignty, minorities, and migration.
This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.
SUP: https://www-sup.stanford.edu/books/title/?id=33140
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Papers by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.
https://www-sup.stanford.edu/books/title/?id=33140
Leyla Amzi-Erdoǧdular and Zeynep Çelik
This collection of articles examines and problematizes the use of visual sources in writing histories of the of late Ottoman period. The time bracket defined by the mid-nineteenth century and World War I corresponds to an explosion of visual documentation, extending from cartography to, of course, photography. Developments in the print world increasingly capitalized on them. As images became more and more accessible, they were integrated in myriad ways into the historical narrative regardless of the subject—political, cultural, social, environmental, urban, artistic, architectural, and even economic. Nevertheless, the current interpretations often tend to ignore visual documents or reduce them to decorative backgrounds—as light distractions from the serious textual research, and as opposed to their central use in art and architectural history. Based on the presentations at a conference under the same title we organized as part of the Columbia University Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies in May 2017, a group of emerging historians discuss here their methodological experiments with visual documents. They investigate their potential to reveal historical information and insights hidden from or neglected by the textual ones, without merely replacing historians’ notorious textual archival fetishism with one for visuals. They use the latest technological tools to scrutinize the representations in micro and macro scales, contributing to the emergent field of Ottoman digital humanities. To this end, they identify key methodological issues in the use of visual documents in an interdisciplinary, experimental, flexible, and open-ended manner. The questions the contributors raise include: How do academic disciplines interact with each other and learn from each other? How can a good balance be maintained in synthesizing seemingly incompatible sources? How elastic are the methodologies adopted, and how far can their elasticity be taken? Several overarching themes emerge from the discussions, including reading the absences, understanding the urge to find effective ways of conveying knowledge, and rebuilding the architectural past. Nevertheless, these are not rigid categories with fixed boundaries as there is a great deal of overlap and slippage between them. The first two articles complicate their stories by reading the absences as they go back and forth between visual and written sources. Mehmet Kentel studies an album by caricaturist Yusuf Franko, who opens a surprising insider’s perspective to the esteemed cosmopolitan milieu of late nineteenth-century Pera. In Franko’s cartoons he discovers forms of self-criticism that written sources of the period would not expose. Furthermore, he complements Franko’s stories by portraying this community from other sources to trace who and what are missing from the repertory of the drawings. Michael Talbot shows that sometimes visuals not only spotlight written sources’ absentees, but question the original intensions. By zooming into photographs of late Ottoman Jerusalem and micro-reading the faces, bodies, and physical gestures of the individuals in the crowds depicted in the frames, he recovers the experience of watching and listening to a provincial Ottoman military band. He discovers through the photographs of independent studios that, contrary to reports in pro-government press of the period, street performances of the Ottoman military band were not the best show in town. However, Talbot’s conclusions do translate to Ottoman state’s failure to take advantage of the power of the visual media. The other three articles shift the perspective from moveable objects, frozen by the painter’s brush or camera lens to spaces. Burçak Özlüdil Altın and Dotan Halevy show different ways in which modern states shaped the late Ottoman landscape. They rebuild the architectural past. Özlüdil Altın traces the architectural transformation of an Ottoman külliye into an asylum for the mentally ill. By recovering the interventions through plans and photographs, she links architectural repurposing to the spatial embodiment of modern psychiatry in the late Ottoman Empire. Halevy probes the British manipulation of historical monuments in Mandatory Palestine. He investigates the Mandatory government’s preservation of the “Tower of Ramleh” and the later reincarnations of its image in proposing an argument on British efforts to eliminate “Ottoman ruins” from the landscape of Palestine. Finally, Zeinab Azarbadegan investigates the production of knowledge in history, geography, and archaeology in Ottoman Iraq to contribute to Iranian identity during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign (1848–96). She analyzes Qajar geographical texts, maps, travelogues, and photographs to argue that the Qajars capitalized on the new technologies of rule, utilized by colonial European empires. Azarbadegan concludes that non-European empires participated actively in modern technologies to assert sovereignty.
Acknowledgements: We express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University Newark. ([email protected]) Zeynep Çelik is a distinguished professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Federated Department of History at the NJIT and Rutgers University Newark. ([email protected])
Talks by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
Book Reviews by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
Books by Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.
SUP: https://www-sup.stanford.edu/books/title/?id=33140
This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.
https://www-sup.stanford.edu/books/title/?id=33140
Leyla Amzi-Erdoǧdular and Zeynep Çelik
This collection of articles examines and problematizes the use of visual sources in writing histories of the of late Ottoman period. The time bracket defined by the mid-nineteenth century and World War I corresponds to an explosion of visual documentation, extending from cartography to, of course, photography. Developments in the print world increasingly capitalized on them. As images became more and more accessible, they were integrated in myriad ways into the historical narrative regardless of the subject—political, cultural, social, environmental, urban, artistic, architectural, and even economic. Nevertheless, the current interpretations often tend to ignore visual documents or reduce them to decorative backgrounds—as light distractions from the serious textual research, and as opposed to their central use in art and architectural history. Based on the presentations at a conference under the same title we organized as part of the Columbia University Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies in May 2017, a group of emerging historians discuss here their methodological experiments with visual documents. They investigate their potential to reveal historical information and insights hidden from or neglected by the textual ones, without merely replacing historians’ notorious textual archival fetishism with one for visuals. They use the latest technological tools to scrutinize the representations in micro and macro scales, contributing to the emergent field of Ottoman digital humanities. To this end, they identify key methodological issues in the use of visual documents in an interdisciplinary, experimental, flexible, and open-ended manner. The questions the contributors raise include: How do academic disciplines interact with each other and learn from each other? How can a good balance be maintained in synthesizing seemingly incompatible sources? How elastic are the methodologies adopted, and how far can their elasticity be taken? Several overarching themes emerge from the discussions, including reading the absences, understanding the urge to find effective ways of conveying knowledge, and rebuilding the architectural past. Nevertheless, these are not rigid categories with fixed boundaries as there is a great deal of overlap and slippage between them. The first two articles complicate their stories by reading the absences as they go back and forth between visual and written sources. Mehmet Kentel studies an album by caricaturist Yusuf Franko, who opens a surprising insider’s perspective to the esteemed cosmopolitan milieu of late nineteenth-century Pera. In Franko’s cartoons he discovers forms of self-criticism that written sources of the period would not expose. Furthermore, he complements Franko’s stories by portraying this community from other sources to trace who and what are missing from the repertory of the drawings. Michael Talbot shows that sometimes visuals not only spotlight written sources’ absentees, but question the original intensions. By zooming into photographs of late Ottoman Jerusalem and micro-reading the faces, bodies, and physical gestures of the individuals in the crowds depicted in the frames, he recovers the experience of watching and listening to a provincial Ottoman military band. He discovers through the photographs of independent studios that, contrary to reports in pro-government press of the period, street performances of the Ottoman military band were not the best show in town. However, Talbot’s conclusions do translate to Ottoman state’s failure to take advantage of the power of the visual media. The other three articles shift the perspective from moveable objects, frozen by the painter’s brush or camera lens to spaces. Burçak Özlüdil Altın and Dotan Halevy show different ways in which modern states shaped the late Ottoman landscape. They rebuild the architectural past. Özlüdil Altın traces the architectural transformation of an Ottoman külliye into an asylum for the mentally ill. By recovering the interventions through plans and photographs, she links architectural repurposing to the spatial embodiment of modern psychiatry in the late Ottoman Empire. Halevy probes the British manipulation of historical monuments in Mandatory Palestine. He investigates the Mandatory government’s preservation of the “Tower of Ramleh” and the later reincarnations of its image in proposing an argument on British efforts to eliminate “Ottoman ruins” from the landscape of Palestine. Finally, Zeinab Azarbadegan investigates the production of knowledge in history, geography, and archaeology in Ottoman Iraq to contribute to Iranian identity during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign (1848–96). She analyzes Qajar geographical texts, maps, travelogues, and photographs to argue that the Qajars capitalized on the new technologies of rule, utilized by colonial European empires. Azarbadegan concludes that non-European empires participated actively in modern technologies to assert sovereignty.
Acknowledgements: We express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia University for their help in publication. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University Newark. ([email protected]) Zeynep Çelik is a distinguished professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Federated Department of History at the NJIT and Rutgers University Newark. ([email protected])
This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.
SUP: https://www-sup.stanford.edu/books/title/?id=33140