History and Sociology of Science
Associate Professor
Faculty Director, Middle East Center
Curriculum Vitæ
Education
Ph.D. University of California - San Diego
M.A. Sabanci University, Istanbul
B.A. St. John's College
My first book Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732 (2019) explored 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 writing a short book, titled The Science that Historians Made, that deals with questions of scientific work, culturally specific and culturally non-specific features of science and the relationship between the twentieth century and the twenty first century.
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.
Currently, I serve as the Faculty Director of the Penn's Middle East Center and am an elected member of History of Science Society's Council.
Ottoman Turkish transliteration keyboard for MacOS
Research Interests
Sociology of science
Science and Translation
Historiography of Non-Western Science
Cultural history of early modern science and technology
Science and philosophy in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world
Science Studies
Science and religion
Global history
Selected Work
“The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” Journal for the History of Knowledge 1/1 (2020): [13] 1-16.
"Early Modern Ottoman Science: A New Materialist Framework," Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 407-419.
“Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Eighteenth Century: Esad of Ioannina and Greek Aristotelianism at the Ottoman Court,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 41 (2013): 125-159.
“Islam, Christianity and the Conflict Thesis,” in Geoffrey Cantor, Thomas Dixon and Stephen Pumfrey, eds. Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 111-130.
Teaching Fields
History of Early Modern Science
Science and Religion
The Enlightenment
Science Studies
