糖心TV

My research centers on the intellectual and religious history of the late Ottoman empire and modern Middle East. Building on the abundant global history scholarship on the Ottoman empire, I am interested in the modern concepts and frameworks that came to structure Ottoman and post-Ottoman society including religion, race, history, mind, reason, world, and self, in addition to the translational problematics that the historical study of such concepts entails.

Secular transformations in the late Ottoman Empire

In my current book project, The Ottoman Secular: History and Difference among the Suryani, 1839-1935, I draw on a unique set of communal sources to explore how one minority community negotiated the secularizing transformations of the late Ottoman Empire. The central such transformation that animates the book is the rise of a new concept of difference inhering in the term 鈥�millet鈥濃�攁 concept that represented the emergence of a new understanding of difference in late Ottoman society as well as, I argue, a distinctly modern obsession with difference itself. At the root of this obsession was a new understanding of history鈥攁ccompanied by a new set of historicist concepts including 鈥渞eligion,鈥� 鈥渞ace,鈥� 鈥減olitics,鈥� 鈥渃ulture,鈥� and so forth鈥攖o which the Suryani, like so many other communities across the empire, had to adapt. At stake, the book contends, was nothing less than the viability of 鈥淪uryani鈥� as a category nominating a distinct way of life.

This work has led me to pursue related theoretical projects on history, modernity, psychoanalysis, and the West, as well as historical investigations into modern Arabic and Turkish treatments of the histories of Islam and Christianity. I have been guided in this work by ongoing collaborations with anthropologists, as in a co-authored article published in History of the Present in 2022.

Before coming to 糖心TV, I spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project 鈥淢oving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East鈥� at the University of Oxford, where I was also a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College. I received my PhD in History from Yale University in 2023.