Phone:

(812) 856-0309

Email:

iksahin@indiana.edu

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Full Biography

I am a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a particular interest in history writing, governance, religious/confessional identity, and ceremonies and rituals. The Ottoman Empire expanded over three continents, played an active role in global political and economic struggles, and ruled over various ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. To do justice to the depth and breadth of the historical experiences faced by individuals and groups who entered the empire’s orbit, I particularly emphasize comparative and regional/global perspectives.

My first book revolves around the life and writings of an Ottoman career bureaucrat, Celalzade Mustafa (ca. 1490-1567), and discusses the rise of a new Ottoman bureaucracy, the emergence of a new historical consciousness, and the creation of an Ottoman imperial culture that saw itself in direct competition with the Habsburgs and the Safavids. I argue that Ottoman attempts at empire-building in the first half of the sixteenth century reflect the general trends of a world-historical moment, and that the Ottomans have to be evaluated together with a host of other polities extending from Tudor England to Mughal India and beyond.

Without ignoring the specificity of any local/regional experiences, I continue to use a comparative approach in my current research and writing projects. My biography of the Ottoman sultan Süleyman (r. 1520-1566) will be published by Oxford University Press as Peerless among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman in 2023. Other forthcoming publications include a co-edited volume on Ottoman political thought, under contract with Oxford University Press, and a co-edited special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History on ceremonies and rituals in the early modern period.

Honors Awards

• Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies Residential Fellowship, 2023-24 (deferred).
• Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study Residential Fellowship, 2020-2021.
• Leibniz Institute for European History (IEG), Mainz, Senior Fellowship, 2021.
• Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study Residential Fellowship, Fall 2017.
• NEH Summer Institute Grant, to organize “Beyond East and West: the Early Modern World, 1400-1800,” Indiana University, June-July 2017.
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, 2015-16.
• SSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research: Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections, 2012-2013.
• Sherman Emerging Scholar, 2011-2012, University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
• The Newberry Library, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, 2010-2011.

Education

• Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago, 2007.

Publications

• Books
• Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Turkish translation: Kanuni Devrinde İmparatorluk ve İktidar: Celalzade Mustafa ve 16. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Dünyası. Trans. Ahmet Tunç Şen. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2014.
• Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
• “The Personal Anthology of an Ottoman Litterateur: Celalzade Salih (d. 1565) and his Mecmu’a,” in Seyfi Kenan and Akşin S. Somel (eds.), Dimensions of Transformation in the Ottoman Empire from the Late Medieval Age to Modernity (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 165-82. Co-authored with Cornell H. Fleischer.
• “To Observe, to Record, to Depict: Memorializing the Circumcision of an Ottoman Prince, ca. 1582-ca. 1600,” History and Theory 58, 4 (December 2019), page numbers TBD.
• “Staging an Empire: An Ottoman Circumcision Ceremony as Cultural Performance,” American Historical Review 123, 2 (April 2018), 463-92.
• “Political Pragmatism, Humanist Ideals and Early Modern Orientalism in Busbecq’s Turkish Letters,” in Markus Keller and Javier Irigoyen-Garcia (eds.), The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, 1492-1700 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 33-49.
• “A Tale of Two Chancellors: Niccolò Machiavelli, Celālzāde Muṣṭafā, and Connected Political Cultures in Early Modern Eurasia,” in Giuseppe Marcocci and Lucio Biasiori (eds.), Machiavelli, Islam and the East: Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 157-176.
• “From Frontier Principality to Early Modern Empire: Limitations and Capabilities of Ottoman Governance,” in William Caferro (ed.), The Routledge History of the Renaissance (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 321-36.
• “Courtly Connections: Anthony Sherley’s Relation of his Trauels into Persia(1613) in a Global Context,” Renaissance Quarterly, 69, 1 (2016): 80-115, co-authored with Julia Schleck.
• “Imperialism, Bureaucratic Consciousness and the Historian’s Craft: A Reading of Celalzade Mustafa’s Tabakatu’l-memalik,” in H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (eds.), Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future: Historiography of the Ottoman Empire (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 39-57.
• (Turkish translation: “İmparatorluk, Bürokrasi Bilinci ve Tarihçinin Zanaatı,” in H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (eds.), Osmanlı Sarayında Tarihyazımı (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2014), 46-68.)
• “Constantinople and the End Time: The Ottoman Conquest as a Portent of the Last Hour,” The Journal of Early Modern History 14 (2010): 317-54.
• Edited volumes and special journal issues
• Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, 1, special issue on “The Early Modern Islamic City,” co-edited with Babak Rahimi, Winter 2019.
• Radical History Review 130, special issue on “Premodern Radicalisms, Radical Premodernisms,” co-edited with Dave Kinkela and Duane Corpis, January 2018.
• Catalogue essay
• “On the Works of a Historical Nature in the Bayezid II Library Inventory” and “List of Entries,” in Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4), vol. 1: Essays, eds. Gülru Necipoğlu et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 569-96, co-authored with Cornell H. Fleischer.
• Review article
• “The Ottoman Empire in the Long Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly 70, 1 (2017): 220-34.
• Miscellaneous
• “Introduction: The Early Modern Islamic City,” special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, 1 (Winter 2019): 1-15, co-authored with Babak Rahimi.
• “Introduction: Early Modernity/Modernities: The Possibilities and Limits of the Concept for a Radical History of the Premodern Past,” Radical History Review 130 (January 2018): 1-7, co-authored with David Kinkela and Duane Corpis.
• (With Cornell H. Fleischer), “Suleiman the Magnificent,” in Gerhard Bowering, et. al., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Other Activities

Service to the Profession (selected)

• Discipline Representative for the Islamic World, The Renaissance Society of America, 2014-present.
• Member, Editorial Collective, Radical History Review, Fall 2014-Spring 2019.
• Academic Director, Indiana University Eurasia Gateway, Office of the Vice President for International Affairs, January 2016-December 2018.
• Member, Committee on Committees, American Historical Association, 2016-2019.
• Member, Faculty Advisory Board, Indiana University Press, July 2016-June 2019; June 2020-present.
• Organizer, NEH Summer Institute, Beyond East and West: The Early Modern
  World, 1400-1800, Indiana University, June-July 2017.
• Director (interim), Indiana University, Renaissance Studies, July 2018-June 2019.
• Member, Editorial Board, I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History, July 2019-present.
• Member, Editorial Board, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Fall 2019-present.
• Member, Editorial Board, International Journal for Middle East Studies, January 2020-present.
• Director, Indiana University, Islamic Studies Program, July 2021-June 2022.