CMES: The Business of Astrology in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
Friday, April 27, 2018, 4:00pm to 6:00pm
CMES, Rm 102, 38 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
The CMES Sohbet-i Osmani Lecture Series presents
A. Tunç Şen
Assistant Professor of History, Department of History, Columbia University
A. Tunç Şen is an Asst. Prof. of History at Columbia University Department of History. Anchored in early modern Ottoman history and culture, his research and teaching focus on the history of science and divination in early modern Islamicate world, history of books and readers in Islamic manuscript culture, and social history of Ottoman scholarly life. He has published several articles and book chapters on the cultivation of astrology and other divinatory practices in the early modern Ottoman court and Ottoman dream narratives. He is currently working on two book projects. The first, based on his dissertation entitled "Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court, 1450s-1550s", examines the place of astrology and astrologers in the early modern Ottoman/Islamicate world. The second book project, a micro historical study of a mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman scholar, explores the social and emotional world of less-fortunate learned individuals in the face of changing bureaucratic realities.
See also: Turkey, History, Sohbet-i Osmani, 2017-18