Job title:
Professor of History; Interim Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Department:
History
Bio/CV:
Christine Philliou specializes in the political and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her first book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011) examined the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. It did so using the vantage point of Phanariots, an Orthodox Christian elite that was intimately involved in the day-to-day work of governance even though structurally excluded from the Ottoman state. Her next book was a history of the Turkish word and concept ofmuhalefet, or opposition and dissent, and turned to the political, personal and intellectual/artistic itinerary of the Turkish writer Refik Halit Karay (1888-1965) to advance a new understanding of dissent and the transformation of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Her latest books,An Ottoman Pompeii: The Greek Revolution and the Limits of Conviviality in 1821 Istanbul(Koç University Press 2026) andNaming Non-Muslims: A Guide to Reading Greek, Armenian and Jewish Names in Ottoman Sources(Asini Books, 2026) grow out of the İstanΠόλις collaborative (Istanpolis.org) that she founded, which focuses on 19th-century Istanbul. Her next book,The Post-Ottoman Worldis forthcoming with Princeton University Press.
Her interests and other publications have had to do with comparative empires across Eurasia, various levels of transitions from an “Ottoman” to a “post-Ottoman” world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and political and cultural interfaces in the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Balkans in the early modern and modern eras. She teaches seminars such as “The post-Ottoman World, “Culture and Migration in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1800-2000,” “The Ottoman Empire and its Rivals,” and “World War One in the Middle East.”
