Historian Edhem Eldem has taught at the universities of Boğaziçi, Berkeley, Harvard and Columbia, EHESS, EPHE and ENS. He is the author of works on the Levant trade, funerary epigraphy, the Ottoman Bank, the dynamics of Westernization, Istanbul at the turn of the 20thcentury , Orientalism, photography, the history of archaeology and collections in the Ottoman Empire.
This year's lectures will focus on the period 1876-1908, corresponding to the reign of Abdülhamid II, who put an end to the chaos of 1876 by establishing an increasingly oppressive regime. During this period of violence and autocracy, faced with the perils of Western imperialism and local nationalism, the empire attempted to redefine itself in a dark and disquieting modernity, many traces of which still remain in present-day Turkey.
