After having spent years studying the history of the Eastern Mediterranean—from Gilgamesh to Gezi—in the „Near East“ (Leipzig), „Middle East“ (Istanbul and Cairo) and the „German South“ (Munich) I decided it is time to come back to Berlin, my hometown in order to particularly work on the late Ottoman Empire and the nascent Turkish Republic.

Historicizing the New, Historicizing the Avant-Garde. A History of the late Ottoman Magazine Servet-i Fünûn

My dissertation project will be centered on the burgeoning field of global history by looking at one of the nodal points of the first globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century, the media. To be precise, the research project will engage with the Ottoman-Turkish illustrated weekly Servet-i Fünûn (Wealth of Sciences; 1891-1944) over the next years and trace the weekly’s representations of "modernity" by analysing its truly global, intellectual entanglements.

contact: kolland@zedat.fu-berlin.de