İlyas, İskender, Belkıs: Anadolu/Osmanlı Kültür Evreni
Starting to work on a brand new topic requires a lot of reflexion and it is very difficult to describe a research which will take shape only along the road, in progress. Kafadar in his immersive seminar will try to map a cultural semantic field through figures like Hızır/Khidr/Man-of-green, Ilyas/Elias, Iskender/Alexander and Belkıs/Nigist Saba. How do these figures, and the tales associated with them, endow a cultural sphere as well as a physical/human geography with meaning? How would it be possible to conceive the old “universe/horizon of meaning” today, how to drag the past field of experience into the present, how to write and tell it — with which words and why? These questions will be considered within the framework of the late medieval/early modern lands of Rum.
Cemal Kafadar (born 1954) is the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1990. Educated at Robert College in Istanbul, Hamilton College, and McGill University (PhD, 1987), he previously taught at Princeton's Near Eastern Studies department before joining Harvard. A social and cultural historian of the late medieval and early modern Middle East and southeastern Europe, he is the author of Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (University of California Press, 1995), which has been translated into Arabic, Greek, Persian, and Turkish. His broader scholarly interests encompass Ottoman popular culture, urban history, Sufi hagiography, travel literature, and the relationship between history and cinema. He has been a visiting professor at Boğaziçi University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Koç University, and is an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society.