Workshop Organizers

E. Natalie Rothman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She received her PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 2006, with a dissertation entitled "Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean." Her research focuses on trans-imperial subjects, men and women who straddled and brokered political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between the Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She recently published "Becoming Venetian: Conversion and Transformation in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean."

Tijana Krstic is Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University. She received her PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2004, with a dissertation entitled "Narrating Conversions to Islam: the Dialogue of Texts and Practices in the Early Modern Ottoman Balkans." Her research focuses on practices and narratives of religious conversion in the Ottoman Empire and the early modern Mediterranean world, particularly in the context of Ottoman-Venetian-Habsburg imperial rivalry.

Workshop Presenters

Avner Ben-Zaken is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He received his PhD in History of Science from UCLA in 2004, with a dissertation entitled "The "Angelus Novus" of Early Modern Science: The Past, The East and the Circulation of the Post-Copernican Astronomies in the Eastern Mediterranean 1560-1660." His recent publications include "The Heavens of the Sky and the Heavens of the Heart: The Islamic Cultural Context for the Introduction of Copernicanism," and "Recent Currents in the Study of Ottoman-Egypt Historiography, with Remarks about the Role of the History of Natural Philosophy and Science."

Giancarlo Casale is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2004, with a dissertation entitled "The Ottoman Age of Exploration: Spices, Maps and Conquest in the Sixteenth-century Indian Ocean." His research involves a study of Ottoman expansion in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century, the history of geography and cartography, global exploration, and comparative naval technology.

Emine Fetvaci is Assistant Professor of Art History at Boston University and a former Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, specializing in Islamic visual culture. She received her Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2005, with a dissertation entitled "Viziers to Eunuchs: Transitions in Ottoman Manuscript Patronage 1566-1617"--a re-evaluation of the most prolific period in Ottoman manuscript production through a study of the networks of political and artistic patronage in court.

Martin Jacobs is Associate Professor of Rabbinic Studies and Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research spans Jewish history and thought from the emergence of classical rabbinic Judaism in first-century Roman Palestine through the Jewish encounter with Islamic civilization in medieval and early-modern times. His numerous publications include Islamische Geschichte in jüdischen Chroniken: Hebräische Historiographie des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (2004), "Joseph ha-Kohen, Paolo Giovio, and Sixteenth-Century Historiography" (2004), "Exposed to all the Currents of the Mediterranean--A Sixteenth-Century Venetian Rabbi on Muslim History" (2005), and "An Ex-Sabbatean's Remorse? Sambari's Polemics against Islam," Jewish Quarterly Review 97/3 (2007): 347-78.

Sean E. Roberts is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at Tufts University. He received his PhD in History of Art from the University of Michigan in 2006, with a dissertation entitled: "Cartography Between Cultures: Francesco Berlinghieri´s Geographia of 1482." His research focuses on early modern books, maps and images, and their currency as visual culture in the Mediterranean world.

Ebru Turan is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 2006 with a dissertation that explored the political career of Ibrahim Pasha (1523-1536), the famous Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I (r. 1520-1566). Her work investigates the relationship between ideology and the process of empire building in the early modern Ottoman polity by contextualizing the question in the political culture of the post-caliphal and post-Byzantine Mediterranean world.

Gillian Weiss is Assistant Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2002. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Back from Barbary: French Slavery and Muslim Conquest in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Her recent articles include "Humble Petitioners and Able Contractors: French Women as Intermediaries in the Redemption of Captives" and "Barbary Captivity and the French Idea of Freedom."

Gerard Wiegers is Professor of Religious and Islamic Studies at Radboud University at Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1991 and is currently one of the foremost authorities on Islam in early modern Spain, North Africa and the Netherlands. He specializes in aljamiado and polemical Muslim literature and has written extensively on the role of Morisco intellectuals in early modern Spanish and Dutch cultural politics. He is the author of numerous essays and edited volumes. His books include the acclaimed Islamic Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado: Yça of Segovia (fl. 1450), His Antecedents and Successors (1993), and A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, A Moroccan Jew in Protestant and Catholic Europe, co-authored with Mercedes Garcia-Arenal (2003).

Bronwen Wilson is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 1999. Her book, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (University of Toronto Press, 2005) won the Roland H. Bainton Prize for History in Art and Music.

Workshop panellists, discussants, and participants

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto
Virginia Aksan, McMaster University
Megan Armstrong, McMaster University
Elizabeth Cohen, York University
Tom Cohen, York University
Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto
Cornell Fleischer, University of Chicago
Diane Owen Hughes, University of Michigan
Adnan Husain, Queen's University
Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota
Mark Meyerson, University of Toronto
Victor Ostapchuk, University of Toronto
Pat Simons, University of Michigan