Join the Center for Palestine Studies on 28 October 2021 for the next event in our Readings in the Khalidiyya series with A. Tunç Şen (Columbia University) and Guy Burak (New York University).
Ottoman Librarians and their Metadata
1pm New York / 8pm Jerusalem
28 October 2021
The panel will discuss the inventory of the palace library of Bayezid II, located in Istanbul (early 16th century), the inventories of the library of the complex of Mehmet II, also located in Istanbul (15-16th centuries) and the inventory of the library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, located in 'Akka, Palestine (late 18th century).
A. Tunç Şen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of Ottoman and modern Turkey whose published work focuses on sciences and divinatory practices, manuscript studies, history of emotions, and social history of scholarship in the early modern Ottoman and Islamicate context. He is currently finishing his first book, Masters of Time: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise at the Early Modern Ottoman Court, where he examines the layers and limits of the scientific authority of stargazers in measuring and interpreting time from chronological dating to calendars and auspicious moments.
Guy Burak is the Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies at NYU's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. He is the author of The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2015). His research focuses on the legal, intellectual and visual histories of the Islamic East in the post-Mongol period.
This event is co-presented with the Khalidi Library, the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies and New York University Libraries.
Located in Jerusalem, the Khalidiyya Library is arguably the most important manuscript collection in Palestine and one of the most significant family-owned Islamic manuscripts collections in the world. The library’s collection was recently digitized and made available to scholars by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML). The accessibility of the collection to users around the world will surely open up new avenues for the study of the history and intellectual life of Palestine and the wider region.
Readings in the Khalidiyya celebrates the new accessibility of the Khalidiyya Library collection through conversations with scholars involved in manuscript studies. Recordings of previous sessions are available here.