Cemal Kafadar Between Past and Present, Part 1

Episode 464

with Cemal Kafadar

hosted by Maryam Patton, Chris Gratien, and Sam Dolbee

In part one of our interview with Cemal Kafadar, we discuss his intellectual influences in the broadest sense, ranging from the Balkan accents of the Istanbul neighborhood in which he grew up to his early interest in theater and film. Kafadar talks about key events that shaped his worldview, including the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution. He also touches on the works of history and literature that inspired him, as well as his first archival forays in the shadow of the 1980 military coup. And in closing, he brings up a question that nagged him from the beginning: "do we do what we do to understand, or do what we do to change the world?"

We'll speak more about that question in part two of this interview, coming soon.

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Contributor Bios

	Cemal Kafadar is the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies and Acting Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University. A sampling of his published works includes Between Two Worlds, "How Dark is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul," and Kendine Ait Bir Roma.
	Sam Dolbee is a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He completed his PhD at New York University in 2017. His research is on locusts and the environmental history of the Jazira region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
	Maryam Patton is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program. She is interested in early modern cultural exchanges, and her dissertation studies cultures of time and temporal consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
	Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. He is currently preparing a monograph about the environmental history of the Cilicia region of the former Ottoman Empire from the 1850s until the 1950s.

Credits

Episode No. 464
Release Date: 29 June 2020
Recording Location: Harvard University
Sound production by Maryam Patton, Chris Gratien, and Sam Dolbee
Music: Pacing - Chad Crouch
Bibliography compiled by Sam Dolbee

Select Bibliography

Andrews, Walter G. and Mehmet Kalpaklı. The Age of the Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

Atay, Oğuz. Tutunamayanlar. 1971-1972.

Barkan, Ömer Lütfi. Türkiye'de Toprak Meselesi. İstanbul: Gözlem Yayınları, 1980.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Sian Reynolds. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1972.

Cemal Paşa. Hatırat; 1913-1922. 1922.

Coppola, Francis Ford. Apocalypse Now. 1979.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Golon, Anne and Serge. Angélique, Marquise des Anges. 1956.

Kafadar, Cemal. Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995

_____. "Mütereddit Bir Mutasavvıf: Üsküplü Asiye Hatun'un Rüya Defteri 1641-1643." In Kim var imiş biz burada yoğ iken: Dört Osmanlı: Yeniçeri, Tüccar, Derviş ve Hatun. İstanbul: Metis, 2009.

_____. "How Dark is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul." In Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean. Edited by Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. 243-269.

_____. Kendine Ait bir Roma. İstanbul: Metis, 2017.

Necipoğlu, Gülrü. Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Kim, Sooyong. The Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Nadir, Kerime. Hıçkırık: Roman. 1938.

Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü. 1954.