My work explores science during one of the most tumultuous periods in Ottoman history. I focus especially on the role of scientific knowledge in the emergence of the early modern Ottoman state. My primary inspirations are the materialist historiography of science and the emerging global history of early modern science. 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. I am currently completing a monograph with the tentative title, Early Modern Ottoman Science, 1650-1750: Commerce, State-Building and the Question of Enlightenment. The questions I ask are how the content and scope of science were transformed over the long seventeenth century and how natural knowledge became a secular, independent and practical domain. I also investigate the role of religion -- puritanism, conversion, heterodoxy and the relations between different religious communities - in scientific ideas and practices. 

Upcoming Talks: 

"Modern Latins and Franks: A Preliminary Census of European Physicians in Ottoman Texts" -- Medicine, Environment and Health in the Eastern Mediterranean World, 1400-1750, Christ's College, Cambridge University. April 3-4, 2017.

"Ali Munshi (d.1750) and American Exotica" -- Consuming the Exotic, Cambridge University. April 5-6, 2017.

"Copernicus for Tax Collectors? Practical Astronomy and Statecraft in the Late Seventeenth Century" -- Ilm wa Amal: Acting Bodies-Conceiving Space in Medieval and Early Modern Islamicate Sciences, Stanford University. April 14-15, 2017.