Conférences d’Ahmet Ersoy, Professeur associé à l’Université du Bosphore (Turquie) — 05-07-12-21/02/2018

Ahmet Ersoy is Associate Professor at the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His research involves the cultural history of the Late Ottoman Empire with a special focus on visuality and its links with rising discourses of locality and authenticity during a period of westernizing change. His recent work involves a study of photography and other means of mechanical image-reproduction in the late Ottoman world. He aims to understand the broader impact of this new media regime in the context of Ottoman culture. Ersoy is the author of Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (2015), and the co-editor, with Vangelis Kechriotis and Maciej Gorny, of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1775-1945), vol. III (2010).

Conférences

1- Late Ottoman New Media: Journal Reading, Visuality and Historical Experience During the Hamidian Era (1876-1909)

Dans le cadre du séminaire d’Özgür Türesay, « Histoire de la presse ottomane, XIX^e-XX^e siècle »

This lecture is part of a broader project that investigates photography in the Ottoman Empire with particular focus on illustrated journals. The project focuses on the Ottoman journals as a commercialized domain for the practice and dissemination of photography. Concentrating on the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), a period that witnesses the beginnings of print industry in the empire and the meteoric rise in the popularity of illustrated journals, it follows the protean traces of photographs as they were remediated in the journals. The journals are explored as harbingers of a new from of acquiring and organizing knowledge at the onset of the age of mass media.

• Lundi 5 février 2018, EPHE, 14 h-16 h (salle H 638, Escalier U, Sorbonne, 54 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris).

2- Medievalism, Orientalism and Historical Sensibility During the Late Ottoman Period

Dans le cadre du Séminaire d’itinéraires et de débats CETOBAC

This lecture explores the rise of a modern sense of history in the Ottoman domain in the second half of the nineteenth century, and traces the emergence of a novel interest in the Medieval roots of the Ottoman dynasty. While investigating historicizing trends in architecture, literature and art, it also dwells upon recently discovered archival sources about a photographic and documentary mission sent by Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) to Bithynia, the legendary geography of late Medieval Ottoman origins.

• Mercredi 7 février 2018, EHESS, 10 h-13 h (salle AS1-24, 54 Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris).

3- Ottoman “Pictorial Turn”: Print Culture and Photography at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Dans le cadre du séminaire d’Özgür Türesay, « Histoire de la presse ottomane, XIX^e-XX^e siècle »

In connection with Lecture 1, this talk explores the impact of the illustrated journal on popular Ottoman historical sensibilities. It examines how “antiquities” (what the Ottomans refer to as “âsâr-ı ‛atika,” encompassing both Ottoman and ancient historic sites and objects) were made tangible and endowed with new significance through the “first-hand experience” of the camera. Beyond the officially sanctioned realm of monuments, it also reveals how even the paltry traces of the past were marked out and elevated as objects of historic interest and value. Enmeshed with a constant stream of descriptive and historic narratives in the journal pages, these photographic images testified to the rise of a new, more popular and image-based form of historical consciousness in the Ottoman domain.

• Lundi 12 février 2018, EPHE, 14 h-16 h (salle H 638, Escalier U, Sorbonne, 54 rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris).

4- The Rise (and Return) of Ottoman Nostalgia: On the Use and Abuse of Architecture as History

Dans le cadre du séminaire « Arts, patrimoine et culture dans le monde turco-ottoman »

The lecture investigates the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they maneuvered through the nineteenth-century’s vast inventory of available styles and embarked on a revivalist/Orientalist program they identified as the “Ottoman Renaissance.” It reveals how Orientalism was embraced by the Ottomans as a nostalgic pursuit, and as a universally recognizable marker of authenticity. While exploring the historical context of the late Ottoman invention of Ottoman nostalgia, it also touches upon the recent implications of the phenomenon in the official and popular culture of contemporary Turkey.

• Mercredi 21 février 2018, IISMM, 16 h-18 h (salle de réunion, 1^er étage, 96 Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris).

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