Episodes

  • Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow, "Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow, "Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Feb 26 2025
    Today, when we think about Gaza we think about the war, the destruction of the city and the constant movement of its population. In contemporary public discourse, Gaza tends to be characterized solely as a theatre of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. However, little is known about Gaza's society, politics, economy, and culture during the Ottoman era. Drawing on a range of previously untapped local and imperial sources, Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow explore the city's history from the mid-nineteenth century through WWI. In Late Ottoman Gaza: An Eastern Mediterranean Hub in Transformation (Cambridge UP, 2024), they show that Gaza's historical importance extends far beyond the territory of the 'strip' since the city was an important hub for people, goods, and ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity until the twentieth century. Using new digital methodologies, Ben-Bassat and Buessow introduce readers to the world of Gazans from various walks of life, from the traditional Muslim elites to the commoners and minority communities of Christians and Jews. In so doing, they tell the lively story of this significant but frequently misunderstood city. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 1 min
  • Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)

    Emine Ö Evered, "Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity" (U Texas Press, 2024)
    Feb 19 2025
    Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024) investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates. Evered's account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    56 mins
  • Yanni Kotsonis, "The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Yanni Kotsonis, "The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
    Jan 29 2025
    Dr. Yanni Kotsonis, Professor of History and Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University, is the author of The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2025). This deeply researched and beautifully written history traces how something brand new – a Greek nation-state – emerged out of an Ottoman Balkan mosaic of languages, religions, and cultures. The book argues that the Greek Revolution was an event of global historical significance, ushering in an age of ethnocentric nationalism. In addition, Kotsonis' work is a major contribution to the studies of statecraft and mass violence, showcasing how new practices of mass mobilization and warfare transformed Ottomans into “Greeks” and their “Others.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    58 mins
  • The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century

    The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century
    Jan 15 2025
    From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence. In her book The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (University of Cambridge Press, 2024), Dr. Zozan Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    54 mins
  • Olga Borovaya, "The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era" (Berghahn Books, 2024)

    Olga Borovaya, "The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era" (Berghahn Books, 2024)
    Jan 5 2025
    The Rhodes blood libel of 1840, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, was initiated by the island’s governor in collusion with Levantine merchants, who charged the local Jewish community with murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. An episode in the shared histories of Ottomans and Jews, it was forgotten by the former and, even if remembered, misunderstood by the latter. The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era (Berghahn Books, 2024) aims to restore the place of this event in Sephardi and Ottoman history. Based on newly discovered Ottoman and Jewish sources it argues that the acquittal of Rhodian Jews is adequately understood only in the context of the Tanzimat and the Sublime Porte’s foreign relations. Contrary to the common view that Ottoman Jews did not experience the impact of the Tanzimat reforms until the mid-1850s, this study shows that their effects were felt as early as 1840. Furthermore, this book offers a window onto life and intercommunal relations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Serkan Görkemli, "Sweet Tooth and Other Stories" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

    Serkan Görkemli, "Sweet Tooth and Other Stories" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)
    Dec 22 2024
    Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressions of identity collide and naming one's orientation is a fraught endeavor. An eleven-year-old undergoes hand surgery that will allow him to wear a wedding ring in adulthood. Two college roommates reach an erotic understanding as they indulge in dessert. A sex worker travels with an American same-sex marriage activist through the Aegean countryside. A passionate hookup during Istanbul Pride ends in tear gas. Two friends' tempers flare over cold red wine on a hot summer night by the Dardanelles. A father bonds with his son and his son's drag-queen boyfriend over classic Turkish cinema on the Mediterranean coast. In Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (UP of Kentucky, 2024), Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters—Hasan, Gökhan, Nazlı, and Cenk—who search for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place from the 1980s through the 2010s against the backdrop of Turkey's transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations of queer individuals and culture, and the emergence of affirming LGBTQ+ identities. Görkemli creates a complex, engaging network of plots about his characters' struggles and triumphs in navigating families, communities, and themselves. Braving discrimination, they strive to embrace their identities and find joy, solace, and approval within a society that marginalizes who they are and how they love. Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press; winner of the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Book Award presented by the Conference on College Composition and Communication). His creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Image; his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. He was a 2023-24 faculty fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, a contributor in fiction at the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fiction fellow at the 2018 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. Originally from Türkiye, he has a PhD in English from Purdue University and is an associate professor of English at UConn Stamford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Ege Selin Islekel, "Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

    Ege Selin Islekel, "Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
    Dec 20 2024
    What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intelligible? What are people doing in movements across the globe when they gather in public space and recount nightmares of their disappeared loved ones? In Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2024), Ege Selin Islekel creates a South-South dialogue, connecting practices of forced disappearance in Latin America with those in Turkey and the movements of resistance developed by the searchers and remnants. By analyzing methods of power that target death and the afterlives of the dead, Islekel shows that the world is, but need not be, organized by such practices. She shows how people mobilize resistance within the death worlds of necrosovereignty, inventing possibilities from the very stuff of nightmares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Nergis Ertürk, "Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Nergis Ertürk, "Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Dec 18 2024
    Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia UP, 2024) examines political relations and literary translations between Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through to the 1960s. By drawing on a wide range of texts – from erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, to socialist realist novels and theatre – Ertürk argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution. A unique textual exploration, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture. Nergis Ertürk is Associate Professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (2011), which received the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, and editor of the Comparative Literature Studies journal. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 12 mins