Histories of disease, public health, and intoxicants

My most recent research and publication efforts have centered on matters of public health, disease, the state, and gender. Because these concerns also have profound bearing on the role of intoxicants in society, my current book project focuses on the social and political histories of alcohol in Ottoman and republican Turkey.

Histories of schools, education, and modernity

Confronted by threats foreign and domestic, Ottoman leaders sought reforms in accord with modernist philosophies and ideals of state and education. Officials thus charged the empire’s diverse schools with the mission of fostering cohesion and imperial loyalty in the face both of territorial annexation by European rivals and of outright secession by minority populations. My analysis uniquely established that late Ottoman educational policies emerged both as state-led initiatives to achieve social and political control through top-down governmental “reform” schemes and as contested terrains in center-periphery struggles over matters including—but often extending far beyond—curriculum, teachers, and educational taxes.

Histories of national, linguistic, and religious identities

Much of my research on histories of education, public health, and gender is also situated within broader histories both of modernization and of ethnic, national, linguistic, and religious identity construction and politics.
In a context wherein there are constant references in academic and popular accounts to seemingly stark religious-secular and imperial-national divides, I am intrigued by confronting these dualisms, as they may exist but also as they have been constructed.