We are delighted to share that on Thursday 5 February Professor Emeritus Virginia H. Aksan will be joining the team online to discuss her research on the Ottoman Empire.
Virginia Aksan is a prolific academician. Her research interests include military history and trans-imperial intellectual encounters and the circulation of knowledge in the pre-modern Mediterranean and Eurasia.
“My research focus has largely been comparative war & society, especially Ottoman, Austrian & Russian, 18th-mid-19th centuries. I have a special interest in the European obsession with the “Turk,” then and now. Publications include a study of an Ottoman reformer: An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783, Brill, 1995; Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: an Empire Besieged, Pearson-Longman 2007, and with Daniel Goffman, a co-edited volume entitled The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, CUP 2007. With Veysel Şimşek, eds., “Living Empire: Ottoman Identities in Transformation, 1700-1850.” (Conference papers from April 2012 McMaster conference.) Special issue. Osmanlı Araștımaları/Journal of Ottoman Studies 44 (2014). The Ottomans 1700-1923:An Empire Besieged, a revised version of Ottoman Wars, was published by Routledge in 2022.”
Sample articles: “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context 1750-1850,” in Erik Jan Zürcher. ed. Fighting for a Living, Amsterdam, 2013; “The Ottoman Absence from the Battlefields of the Seven Years War,” in Patrick J. Speelman and Mark J. Danley, eds. Seven Years War as a Global Conflict. Leiden, 2013; “Who was an Ottoman? Reflections on ‘Wearing Hats’ and ‘Turning Turk,'” in Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, ed. Europe und die Türkei in 18. Jahrhundert / Europe and Turkey in the Eighteenth Century (Göttingen: 2011); “What’s Up in Ottoman Studies?” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1:1-2 (2014).