By Banu Karaca. The National Frame emerged out of my long-term interest in art, aesthetics and politics. I have always been fascinated by the dominant notion that art is inherently good, by the many values that are accorded to art – be it that art furthers individual agency and critical faculties, the emancipatory potential of art, or its civilizing impact – and the realities that shape the daily workings of the art world.
By Malte Fuhrmann. Port city studies have developed many radical reinterpretations of the Middle East or Southeast Europe, but these have made little inroads into the mainstream. With my book, I aim to rise to that challenge by readdressing an issue of classic political and social history of the nineteenth century: the issue of Europeanization.
By İlkay Yilmaz. In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire attempted to construct new technologies of transportation and communication in its territories. These were not only new technologies for the empire, they were also new to the rest of the world.
By Görkem Akgöz. In the New Year’s special issue of the Vatan (Homeland) newspaper, a Santa Claus-like, Father Time figure (zaman, meaning time) rips off the year 1933 from the calendar to reveal the exciting prospects of the coming year.
We invite contributions to discuss and investigate how infrastructures shape and affect power relations and daily life; how they produce or organize inequalities, discrimination, or differentiated access to public goods and services; and how they may become part of state violence, or resistance, in Ottoman and post-Ottoman geographies.
By Zeynep Türkyilmaz. Entering my usual keywords randomly to see what is out there in my areas of interest, I came across a diary of a Turkish soldier kept during the year 1938. Ego-documents are a rare source in Ottoman-Turkish studies, but the content of this particular diary made it unique and almost unreal beyond my wildest expectations.
Interview on the book “Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I” that was awarded the AMECYS 2020 book award. Nazan Maksudyan is Einstein guest professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and was a EUME Fellow in 2009-10.
İlkay Yılmaz is a 2020 Fellow of Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME), a research program of the Forum Transregionale Studien, and affiliated with Freie Universität...
On Ambivalent Legacies: Political Cultures of Memory and Amnesia in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Lands, special issue of History & Anthropology, Volume 30, No. 4, October 2019. By Jeremy F....
This article is part of the TRAFO series Emerging Topics. Insights from ‘Behind the Scenes’. Today, we put the spotlight on the workshop “Environmental History of the Ottoman Empire”, which...
TRAFO offers a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien, curated in cooperation with the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland.