Title
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Program and in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
Expertise
Islamic and Jewish Studies
Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Sabbatai Sevi and Sabbataians
Profile
He completed his dissertation in the Departments of History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. His studies focuse on Early Modern and Modern Middle Eastern, Ottoman, Mediterranean and Jewish histories. Currently, he is revising a book manuscript titled "Sabbatai Mehmet Sevi and the Sabbataians: A Messiah in the Ottoman Court and Emergence of a Messianic Judeo-Islamic Sect (17th-20th centuries)". There, he argues that members of the Jewish Sabbataian movement in the seventeenth century slowly turned into idiosyncratic Muslim mystics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and eventually emerged as secular Muslims in the twentieth century.
More recently he has been working on contemporary debates around this idiosyncratic Muslim community (e.g. accusations of being "crypto-Jewish") and its relation to the rise of Islamism, anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism in Turkey and the Middle East. Some of his findings were already published in his book in Turkish, which concentrated on the Sabbataianism and minority issues in the contemporary Islamic world. His third book, co-edited with Yaron Ben-Naeh, analyzing interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, is going to be published by the Brill Publication. Among others, he is teaching courses on "History of the Middle East"; "Islam: Civilization and Institutions"; "Political Islam"; "History of the Ottoman Empire"; "Minorities in the Middle East"; and "Islam, the Middle East and the West". He is a receiver of the Derek Bok Center Award of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard University.
Degrees
Harvard University, Ph.D.
Temple University, M.A.
Bosphorus University, B.A.
Awards and Honors
Starr Post-Doc Fellow, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University (2007)
TUBITAK (Turkish National Science Foundation), Research Grant (2007)
EHESS, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France (2006)
NEH-ARIT (National Endowment for Humanities) Post-Doc scholarsip (2005)
Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, Alan M. and Katherien W. Stroock Fellowship (2003)
National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Maurice and Marilyn Cohen (2002)
FLAS, Hebrew, Harvard University (2001)
Harvard-Hebrew University Graduate Scholarship (2000)
Kokalis Program, Harvard University, Summer Research Grant (2000)
Derek Bok Center Award of Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University (1999)
ITS (Institute of Turkish Studies), Research Grant (1999)
Institute for Advance studies, Hebrew University (1999)
Harvard University, Full Scholarhip (1997)
Courses Taught
| IMES | 104a | Islam: Civilization and Institutions |
| NEJS | 187a | Political Islam |
| NEJS | 197a | Survey of Islamic Law: People on the Margins |
| NEJS | 198a | Islam, the Middle East, and the West |
Scholarship