© Nanor Kebranian
Congratulations to Nanor Kebranian on successfully receiving a Principal Investigator Project award from the FWF! Her project will be hosted in our department. Yavuz Köse is her collaboration partner.
Nanor Kebranian is a researcher, writer, and translator working at the intersection of history, literature, and law. She received her doctorate from Oxford University with fellowships from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Oxford’s Clarendon Fund. Most recently, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna (2023 – 2024), and she has held research positions at various universities in the US, UK, and Singapore.
Writing Against the Law: Ottoman-Armenian Print Culture (1857-1914)
This research project initiates the first study assessing the relationship between Ottoman politics and the development of dissident print culture in a non-Muslim Ottoman community between the advent of press laws (1857) and the onset of the First World War (1914). Focusing on the Ottoman-Armenian context, it addresses the linguistic, literary, and imaginal techniques mobilized by this community’s social, political, cultural, and literary actors to discursively and performatively resist imperial restrictions on public discourse and to contest ethno-confessionally defined socio-cultural divisions.
This project pursues three aims. It probes the interrelationship between Tanzimat-era discursive regulation and the emergence of a subversive Armenian print culture. It surveys the semantic strategies employed by Ottoman-Armenians to publicly communicate socio-political grievances during Sultan Abdülhamid II’s strict censorship system. And it investigates the tensions between inter-confessional strife and post-Revolutionary (1908) discursive freedom until the onset of World War I (1914).
This multi-disciplinary research integrates historiography with literary and legal studies to provide a holistic account of dissident late Ottoman-Armenian print culture. Its sources include Ottoman and Armenian archival documents; periodicals; chronicles; ego-texts; songbooks; both contemporaneous and contemporary literary, social, political, and cultural histories; and original as well as translated literary works.
This research redresses a significant epistemic lacuna concerning the socio-political dimensions of the Ottoman Empire’s non-Muslim, non-Turkish literary and cultural traditions. In-depth studies of non-Muslim Ottoman print culture are limited and center mainly on issues of multilingualism, shared public spheres, or translation practices rather than on the interface of culture and politics. In addition, existing studies are based mainly on published and/or secondary sources. Furthermore, the few significant works of Ottoman-Armenian print culture are restricted to the press. By contrast, this project innovates a broader historiographic treatment of these phenomena. It also employs a pioneering thematic approach – literary culture as political dissidence – supported by a comprehensive methodological system that encompasses an unprecedently vast scope of primary and secondary materials in multiple languages, including but not limited to Armenian and Turkish.
Funded by
 |
|
© https://grants.at/en/
Ayşegül Ersin (University of Szeged) and Bilal Akar (University of Milan) have both been awarded the Ernst Mach Grant Worldwide. They will work on their projects at our institute for at least six months, starting this fall. They will be supervised by Yavuz Köse.
Ayşegül Ersin (University of Szeged)
Navigating Multiple Identity and Affiliations of Adolf Farkas in the Late Ottoman Era
This project examines migration, identity, and cultural exchange between the Ottoman Empire and Hungary in the 19th century, focusing on Adolf Farkas (later Osman Pasha) and his daughter, poet Nigâr Hanım. Tracing Farkas from a Moravian-born Christian soldier in the Hungarian army to an Ottoman Muslim, it explores themes of 'nativization' and its evolving meanings. Archival reserach in Vienna, where I previously found a document on Farkas's origins, is key to completing my doctora dissertation.
Bilal Akar (University of Milan)
Leila Bederkhan: Decolonizing a Stateless and Exoticized Dancer’s Archives and Repertoires
Leila Bederkhan (1903–1986), born to an exiled Kurdish aristocrat father and an Austrian Jewish dentist, embodied the complexities of Kurdish statelessness and Jewish displacement. She blended Kurdish heritage with modernist dance while concealing her Jewish identity amidst antisemitism. This research examines her erasure from modern dance history, the colonial and male gaze shaping her persona as a Kurdish Princess, and explores decolonial approaches to archival research and historiography.
|
|
This lecture series explores recent advances in the study of manuscript cultures across the Ottoman Empire, the Arabic-speaking world, and Central Asia. It examines manuscripts as dynamic media for transmitting knowledge, shaping identities, and preserving cultural memory. Emphasizing new methodologies and interdisciplinary perspectives, the series considers manuscripts as material, intellectual, and social artifacts, focusing on their production, circulation, and afterlives.
Through contributions by established and emerging scholars, the series offers a forum for rethinking manuscript cultures as interconnected and evolving phenomena. It engages critically with the historiography of manuscript studies and promotes scholarly collaboration across linguistic, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Sessions address a broad range of traditions—Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew, Chagatai, and others—within a comparative and multilingual framework.
Topics include codicology, palaeography, manuscript production, reading practices, historical libraries, and the transition to print. Special attention is given to digital humanities, cataloguing challenges, and preservation politics. By drawing on case studies from Istanbul, Cairo, Tashkent, and beyond, the series highlights the entangled histories of manuscript cultures and examines how multilingualism, scribal practices, and digital access reshape our understanding of textual heritage.
Look forward to lectures by: Nazlı Vatansever (University of Münster), Katharina Ivanyi (University of Vienna), Ulfat Abdurasulov (Institute of Iranian Studies, ÖAW), Rıza Yıldırım (University of Vienna), Aysima Mirsultan (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin), Tijana Krstić (Central European University), Elif Sezer-Aydınlı (ANAMED, Koç University, Istanbul), Elvira Wakelnig (University of Vienna), Jeanine Dağyeli (University of Vienna), Philip Bockholt (University of Münster), Polina Ivanova (Institute of Iranian Studies, ÖAW), Gisela Procházka-Eisl (University of Vienna), Bruno De Nicola (Institute of Iranian Studies, ÖAW), Daniel Beben (Nazarbayev University).
Stay tuned, the programme will be published shortly:
https://orientalistik.univie.ac.at/fachrichtungen/turkologie/veranstaltungen/ringvorlesung-turkologie/
|
|
We are pleased to announce the upcoming conference "Unfolding an Unacknowledged Written Cultural Heritage: Armeno-Turkish Manuscripts, Prints, and Newspapers" to be held at the University of Vienna from 6-8 August 2025. This landmark event will feature nine thematic panels, bringing together leading international scholars to explore various aspects of Armeno-Turkish textual traditions, including archival sources and language, historiography, multilingualism and translation, sociolinguistics, musical traditions, printing cultures, literary genres, theatre and morality, and post-Ottoman writing cultures. The conference will also feature a distinguished keynote lecture by Sebouh Aslanian (UCLA) on "Armeno-Turkish as a heterographic literary field: Complicating Ottoman Convivencia", a special session on the preservation of Armenian cultural heritage, and a book discussion on "Managing Religious Diversity in the Ottoman Empire: Experiences of Istanbul Armenians in the Nineteenth Century" with Masayuki Ueno (Osaka Metropolitan University). With its rich programme and lively intellectual exchange, the conference aims to discuss current research issues and trends, and to shed new light on the significance of the Armeno-Turkish literary heritage.
For more information and registration: https://mekhitar.univie.ac.at/activities/conference/
|
|
How is thinking and working with a manuscript different from working with an edited text? What challenges arise from a codex containing multiple texts with different dates and authors? How does ‘archival turn’ and social history of the collections inform how we approach manuscripts contained in them? How can digital tools be helpful in editing a text that differs from manuscript to manuscript? Which digital tools are particularly helpful for different aspects of working with manuscripts? These are just some of the important methodological questions that students hoping to work with Islamic manuscripts face when embarking on research or while in the field, often without any recourse to practical guidance. The course will explore these and other questions by focusing specifically on how to think and work with Islamicate manuscripts, with an emphasis on the sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian from Central Asia and the Middle East (c. 1200-c. 1700).
Directors
Tijana Krstić
Department of Historical Studies, Central European University, Vienna, Austria
Bruno De Nicola
Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
Faculty
Dominique Akhoun-Schwarb
Bundespatentgericht, Germany (formerly, SOAS Middle East Library)
Mathew Barber
The Aga Khan University; Institute for the Studies of Muslim Civilization, London, United Kingdom
Efe Erunal
History Department, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey
Konrad Hirschler
Universität Hamburg Faculty of Humanities Asien-Afrika-Institut, Hamburg, Germany
Yavuz Kose
Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna, Austria
Shiva Mihan
Curator of Islamic Collections (Persianate World), British Museum, London, United Kingdom
Marijana Misevic
Department of Historical Studies, Central European University, Vienna, Austria
Lorenz Nigst
The Aga Khan University; Institute for the Studies of Muslim Civilization, London, United Kingdom
Masoumeh Seydi
The Aga Khan University; Institute for the Studies of Muslim Civilization, London, United Kingdom
Summer university course is co-funded by the Open Society Foundations, and supported by the FWF and Cluster of Excellence “Eurasian Transformations” (Grant-DOI: 10.55776/COE8), and the Chair for Ottoman and Turkish Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.
|
|
Österreichisches Staatsarchiv: Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Wien
The Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (IHB) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences is pleased to announce the third installment of its Intensive Summer School on Comparative Habsburg-Ottoman Paleography. This two-week intensive program is dedicated to the comparative study of early modern (1500–1800) Habsburg and Ottoman primary sources.
Paleography courses encompass the study of various scripts in the target languages, the utilization of diverse source materials, the examination of intricate linguistic structures, and the critical analysis of primary sources.
Held at the centrally located Austrian Academy of Sciences in the 1st District of Vienna, the program features morning classes led by experienced instructors and afternoon lectures by distinguished scholars. Additionally, participants will engage in guided visits to Austrian archives (HHStA, ÖNB), selected museums, and a historical tour of Vienna, highlighting sites directly and indirectly linked to Ottoman-Habsburg history.
The Habsburg courses will be taught during the first week (July, 7 – 11)
Teachers:
Zsuzsanna Cziraki (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)
Dimitra Grigoriou (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)
Elisabeth Lobenwein (German Historical Institute in Rome, Italy) Lecturers:
William Godsey (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)
Timothy Olin (Central College, USA)
Tamara Scheer (University of Vienna, Austria)
The Ottoman courses will be taught in the second week (July, 14 – 18)
Teachers:
Ercan Akyol (University of Vienna, Austria)
Nilab Saeedi (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria)
Yasir Yılmaz (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria) Lecturers:
Gisela Procházka-Eisl (University of Vienna, Austria)
Claudia Römer (University of Vienna, Austria)
Marinos Sariyannis (Institute of Mediterranean Studies/FORTH, Greece)
Hüseyin Yılmaz (George Mason University, USA)
  
|
|
Screenshot Transkribus
As one of the first events in the FWF funded Cluster of Excellence "EurAsian Transformations" contributing to the Digital Lab and in connection to the research node “Communication and Mobility" and the “Manuscript Studies in a Eurasian Context” Transversal Working Group, this workshop aims to bring together early-career and more senior scholars, as well as technical specialists, who have worked with or developed OCR (Optical Character Recognition) /HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) tools for under-represented languages and scripts (ie. most languages beyond English), to discuss relevant challenges, potential solutions, and recommendations pertinent to the digitization of textual materials in under-resourced languages and scripts to help the broader scholarly community achieve tangible results.
Organizers
Alíz Horváth (Central European University), Grigor Boykov (University of Vienna), Yavuz Köse (University of Vienna), Patrick McAllister (ÖAW, Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia)
More information is coming soon.
Supported by
 
|
|
Source: Şentürk, Ahmet Atilla. Osmanlı Şiiri Antolojisi, p. 473.The fourth “Colloquium on Ottoman Literature” (COL) will take place on November 20, 2025.
Speakers will include:
Elif Sezer (Sabancı University, Istanbul)
Şerife Yalçınkaya (Ege University, Izmir)
Ercan Akyol (University of Vienna)
Edith Ambros (University of Vienna)
Organizers: Gisela Procházka-Eisl, Ercan Akyol
More information about the program will follow shortly: https://orientalistik.univie.ac.at/fachrichtungen/turkologie/forschung/col-colloquim-on-ottoman-literature/
|
|
|
Turkish Studies Vienna welcomes its newest fellow!
Tunahan Durmaz is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in history at the European University Institute in Florence and is currently a fellow at Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul. In his project, “A Cultural History of Bodily Fluids: Health and Disease in the Ottoman Mediterranean, 1620-1700,” he looks at the perceptions of disease and illness in the late seventeenth-century Ottoman world, intending to comprehend the complex social, cultural, material, and medical aspects of dealing with them in an early modern setting. During his tenure, he will work on his project and will make a research project application to the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Supported by
 
|
|
|
Diyâr Issue 1 (2025) - the first Gold Open Access issue is out!
Our first Gold Open Access issue ist out: "Cultures of Expertise in the Eastern Mediterranean", guest-edited by Barbara Henning, Taisiya Leber, and Ani Sargsyan. All previous (and future) issues are now also fully open access!
https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/en/zeitschrift/2625-9842
If you would like to submit an article, you can find more information here: https://www.nomos.de/en/journals/diyar/
|
|
The latest issue is a special edition on Ottoman consumption, edited by Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke and Deniz Özeren. Both editors are part of the FWF-funded project, "Grocers of Istanbul: Tracing Food Consumption" (GrocerIST). For more information, visit https://grocerist.acdh.oeaw.ac.at.
This special issue features contributions covering the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. You can look forward to articles such as "A Court Physician's Account of Dog-Hunger in the Seventeenth Century," "An 18th-Century Hebrew Expenses Account and a Shopping List," and "Revenues of Ahmet I’s (1603-1617) Pious Foundation from Istanbul Taverns and Alcoholic Beverages".
You can access the full issue via this link:
https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/keshif/issue/archive
|
|
Turkologentag 2025
Mainz, 18-20 September 2025
The Fifth European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Turkologentag 2025) will be held at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from 18–20 September 2025. The conference is organized in cooperation with the Society for Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (GTOT e.V.).
Further information: https://turkologentag.uni-mainz.de/
We are looking forward to meeting you in Mainz.
|
|
Ercan Aykol, Gisela Procházka-Eisl and Claudia Römer will attend the Intensive Summer School on Comparative Habsburg-Ottoman Paleography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences from July 14 to 18, 2025.
Deniz Armağan Akto will attend the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) Conference at Uppsala University in Sweden from August 18 to 22, 2025, to present his paper, "Ottoman Strategies for Coping with Floods on the Danube River in the 16th and 17th Centuries."
Özlem Sultan Çolak will attend the Intensive Summer Course of Armenian Language and Culture from August 1 to 18, 2025, in Venice (supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation).
Özlem Sultan Çolak will attend the Fifth European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Turkologentag 2025) will be held at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from 18–20 September 2025, to present her paper, "Shifting Margins: Ottoman Migration to Argentina and its Absence in Historiography".
Julia Fröhlich will attend the Fifth European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Turkologentag 2025) will be held at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from 18–20 September 2025, to present her paper, "Listed as ‘Greeks’, Treated as ‘Jews’: Greek-Jewish Refugees in Transit (1943-1944) and Their Standing vis á vis Türkiye’s Ambiguous Refugee Management and Immigration Policy".
The GrocerIST team (Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke, Deniz Özeren and Yavuz Köse) will attend Turkologentag 2025, to be held at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz from 18–20 September 2025, to present in the Panel "From Bakkals to Digital Tools: Uncovering Ottoman Consumption Patterns".
Onur İnal will attend the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) Conference at Uppsala University in Sweden from August 18 to 22, 2025, to present his paper, "Nature, Nation and Philately: The Representation of Foundational Stories on Postage Stamps."
Onur İnal will attend the Summer School in Anthropocene Histories from August 25 to 28, 2025, as an advisor. The summer school will be organised by the Center for Anthropocene History at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden (KTH) and the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH).
Onur İnal has been appointed the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Germinate: Environmental History Review to be published digitally on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History. More details and submission information can be found on the official website, g-ehr.com
Dilara Kaplan and Yavuz Köse will attend the inaugural conference "Unfolding an Unacknowledged Written Cultural Heritage: Armeno-Turkish Manuscripts, Prints and Newspapers", to be held at the University of Vienna from August 6 to 8, 2025, to present their paper "Transcribing Armeno-Turkish Heritage with AI Challenges & Opportunities".
Yavuz Köse will take part at the Summer School "Thinking with Islamicate Manuscripts", June 30 to July 11, 2025, at the Central European University, Vienna.
Emre Görkem Onur will attend the inaugural conference "Unfolding an Unacknowledged Written Cultural Heritage: Armeno-Turkish Manuscripts, Prints and Newspapers", to be held at the University of Vienna from August 6 to 8, 2025, to present his paper "Performing Identity? Hagop Ayvaz’s "I Love You" and its Contribution to the Armeno-Turkish Theatrical Landscape".
|
|
Die Studiengrammatik bietet eine praxisnahe Einführung in osmanische Originaltexte. Ziel ist es, Texte mittlerer Schwierigkeitsstufe nicht nur zu verstehen, sondern sie auch philologisch präzise zu transkribieren und ins Deutsche zu übersetzen. Der Zugang erfolgt ausschließlich über Originaltexte aus verschiedenen Genres, die nach steigendem Schwierigkeitsgrad ausgewählt wurden. Von Volksliedern und Heiratsanzeigen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts über Zeitungsartikel und Gedichte bis hin zu magischen Texten des 16. und Chroniken des 15. Jahrhunderts eröffnet das Lehrwerk einen faszinierenden Einblick in die Vielfalt der osmanischen Schriftkultur.
(This grammar study offers a hands-on introduction to reading and analyzing original Ottoman Turkish texts. Its aim is not only to facilitate the comprehension of intermediate-level materials but also to train learners in the accurate philological transcription and German translation of these texts. The book relies exclusively on authentic source materials, drawn from a wide range of genres and arranged in ascending order of difficulty. From folk songs and marriage announcements of the early 20th century to newspaper articles, poems, magical texts from the 16th century, and chronicles dating back to the 15th century, the textbook opens a vivid window onto the richness and diversity of Ottoman written culture.)
|
|
Akyol, Ercan, "Ulysses üzerinden Homeros'a, oradan çevirilere ve Osmanlıca metinlere..." K24
Link: https://www.k24kitap.org/ulysses-uzerinden-homerosa-oradan-cevirilere-ve-osmanlica-metinlere-5099
Akyol, Ercan and Benli, Ali,"Odes to a Rūmī Qāḍī in Greater Syria and Egypt: Literary Networks Surrounding Zekeriyāzāde Yaḥyā Efendī (1561–1644)", Der Islam 102, no. 1 (2025): 211-248. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2025-0007
Edith Gülçin Ambros, "Osmanlı Şiirinde Merkezcil ve Merkezkaç Yapı ve Eğilimler", in "Nerden Gelir Bunca Işık": Prof. Dr. Mehmed Çavuşoğlu Anısına, eds. Müjgân Çakır - Hanife Koncu - Leyla Alptekin Sarıoğlu - Neslihan Polat Aktaş, Istanbul: Büyüyen Ay, 2025, 113-131.
Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke / Deniz Özeren, "Notes from the Guest Editors: At the Margins of Consumption: Reframing Ottoman Historiography", Keshif: E-Journal for Ottoman-Turkish Micro Editions 3/2, Special Issue on Consumption (Spring 2025), 1-4.
Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke, "Post-March Daily Allocations (Taʿyīnāt) of Darendeli Sarı Abdurrahman Paşa", Keshif: E-Journal for Ottoman-Turkish Micro Editions 3/2, Special Issue on Consumption (Spring 2025).
Yavuz Köse, "The Imperial Berāt and the Brand: Award for Feeding wounded Ottoman Soldiers during the first Balkan War", Keshif: E-Journal for Ottoman-Turkish Micro Editions 3/2, Special Issue on Consumption (Spring 2025).
Deniz Özeren, "Fresh Fruit Provision to Mountain Bathhouses in Yalova", Keshif: Special Issue on Consumption 3/2 (Spring 2025).
Gisela Procházka-Eisl, Lehrbuch des Osmanischen. V&R unipress (September 2025).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
