I am something of a generalist as I work across many different sources and registers from the Ottoman medical marketplace to minting practices and, from natural philosophy to gunpowder recipes.

Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732, my first book, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. It explores the relationship between monetary inflation and natural knowledge in seventeenth-century Istanbul. My primary inspirations have been the materialist historiography of science, the emerging global history of early modern science and Pierre Bourdieu's Pascalian Meditations.   

Currently, I am working on three main projects. The first project is a book-length essay on science and time, where I try to reframe concepts such as "theory," "scientific labor," and "useful knowledge" by reference to various durations such as generations, grant cycles and career stages. 

My second project is in collaboration with Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano. We are putting together a sourcebook for Ottoman science between 1400-1700 that features contributions from a number of excellent scholars,. We have received a Dean's Global Inquiries Fund to support a workshop that will take place in early April this Spring. 

I am also part of a research team that investigates notions of the natural and the supernatural in the Ottoman Empire. This is a multi-year project that has generous funding from the ERC. 

 

Academia.edu page

Ottoman Turkish transliteration keyboard for MacOS

Flickr

 

Upcoming Talks

Jan-29: NYU/Abu Dhabi Institute/Kevorkian Center (public event with Walter Feldman)

Mar 5: UC Santa Barbara

Mar 29-31: Mid-Atlantic Ottoman Studies Workshop I at Salisbury University