Kaya Şahin, Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs will present "Public Ceremonies in the Ottoman Empire, ca. 1450-ca. 1580" as part of the CMRS Colloquium Series.
In this talk, Dr. Şahin will discuss public ceremonies organized by the Ottoman palace between 1457 and 1582. These ceremonies allow us to discuss the origins and contents of Ottoman ceremonial culture, which borrowed themes and motifs from the Byzantines, the Venetians, and the myriad Turko-Muslim polities with whom the Ottomans maintained intense diplomatic and cultural relations. They also show how, in early modern societies, public ceremonies served as instruments of governance by creating highly visible, memorable, and relatively participatory events, and by constituting new spaces for political and cultural interactions.
Kaya Şahin is Professor of History and the Vice Provost for International Affairs and Global Strategies at the Ohio State University. After receiving his PhD in History from the University of Chicago, he taught at Northwestern, Tulane, and Indiana. He is the author of Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Empire and Peerless among Princes: The Life and Times of Sultan Süleyman. He published articles on apocalypticism, bureuacracy, early modern Orientalism, crosscultural encounters, and ceremonies and rituals. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally entitled Empire, Ritual, Masculinity: Circumcision Celebrations for Ottoman Princes, 1457-1582.
This event is free and open to the public.
