Director

Dr. Kate Fleet

Dr. Kate Fleet was educated at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where she did her B.A. in Middle Eastern History and Arabic and her Ph.D. on the commercial relations between the Turks and the Genoese 1300-1453. She was appointed to the Skilliter Centre in 1991 and became Director in 2000. She is Postgraduate Tutor at Newnham College where she is a Fellow.

Kate Fleet has taught Ottoman history at SOAS, and Ottoman history, Middle Eastern history, modern Turkish history and Ottoman and modern Turkish at Cambridge, where she was the Newton Trust Lecturer in Ottoman History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the History Faculty from 2001 to 2011. She was Co-Editor of Eurasian Studies from 2002 to 2006, Editor-in-Chief of Turkish Historical Review from 2008-2018 and has been an Executive Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three since 2012.

Her current research interests include the ways in which non-Muslim merchants operated in the Ottoman empire and late Ottoman/early Republican social and diplomatic history.

Her books include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-authored with Ebru Boyar; and Ottoman Economic Practices in Periods of Transformation: The Cases of Crete and Bulgaria (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), co-authored with Svetla Ianeva. She is editor of volume I of The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium-Turkey, 1071-1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and, together with Suraiya Faroqhi, of volume II, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

She has also edited various volumes together with Ebru Boyar: Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Middle Eastern and North African Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019); Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia (Brill: Leiden, 2021); and Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

Recent publications include “The absence of the Ottoman empire in European historiography”, in Imagined, Embodied and Actual Turks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Bent Holm and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag 2020), pp. 27-46; “A shared world of economic knowledge: the Ottoman empire and Europe in the early modern era”, in Les ottomans et l’histoire du monde, ed. Elisabetta Borromeo, Frédéric Hitzel and Benjamin Lellouch (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), pp. 627-42; “Ottoman commercial history”, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); “Taxation in the early Ottoman state, fourteenth to sixteenth centuries”, in The Routledge Handbook of Public Taxation in Medieval Europe, ed. Denis Manjot, Mathieu Caesar, Florent Garnier and Pere Verdés Pijun (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 419-26; and, with Ebru Boyar, “‘Great Britain and a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/6 (2021), 904-19, republished in From Enemies to Allies Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960, ed. Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas and William Hale (London: Routledge, 2023).

 

Academic Advisor

Professor Ebru Boyar

Professor Ebru Boyar studied international relations at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, specialising for her M.Sc. on the development of national identity in Algeria. She then did a Ph.D. in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, on late Ottoman and early Republican representations of the Balkans. She is Professor in and currently chair of the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, where she teaches world history, Ottoman, Turkish and modern Middle Eastern history.

Her current research focuses on Ottoman and Turkish republican social history, with a particular emphasis on the social history of health in the Ottoman and early Turkish republican periods and on the concept of social disorder in the Ottoman empire. She is also interested in Ottoman and Turkish foreign relations from a social history perspective, in particular, in the personal relations between the Ottoman/Turkish and British elite in the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican period, and Ottoman-Safavid relations of the sixteenth century from the perspective of Ottoman propaganda.

Her books include Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007) and, together with Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which has been translated into Chinese and Turkish. She recently edited various volumes together with Kate Fleet: Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Middle Eastern and North African Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019); Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia (Brill: Leiden, 2021); and Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

Her recent publications include “Nations and nationalisms in the late Ottoman Empire”, in The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Volume II Nationalism’s Fields of Interaction, ed. Cathie Carmichael, Mahthew D’Auria and Aviel Roshwald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 24-42; “The draw of the lottery: Piyango, profit and politics in early twentieth-century İzmir”, in Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 175-205; “The late Ottoman brothel in Istanbul: heterosexual social space for homosocial entertainment?”, in Entertainment among the Ottomans, ed. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 160-82; “Yüzellilikler: the League of Nations’s first and only Muslim refugees”, in Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period, eds. Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 105-40 and with Kate Fleet, “Great Britain and ‘a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/6 (2021), 904-19, republished in From Enemies to Allies Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960, ed. Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas and William Hale (London: Routledge, 2023).

For a full publication list, see https://ir.metu.edu.tr/tr/ebru-boyar and https://metu.academia.edu/EbruBoyar.

 

Librarian

Eve Lacey

Eve Lacey is Librarian of the Skilliter Centre Research Library & Archives and Librarian of Newnham College Library. She is a Chartered Member of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals). She studied English at the University of Cambridge, and Library and Information Studies at University College London, where she was awarded the Mary Piggot Prize for cataloguing and classification, the Sir John Macalister Medal for the most distinguished candidate on the MA, and the CILIP Student Prize for exceptional achievement in the field.

Eve contributed to a chapter on Newnham Library’s early history in Walking on the Grass, Dancing in the Corridors : Newnham at 150 (ed. Gill Sutherland and Kate Williams; Profile Editions, 2021) and won the Persepho