This course focuses on one primary source every week. Student’s read relevant scholarship for the first weekly meeting of the class and then discuss the primary source with the instructor on the second meeting.

In addition to the primary sources assigned weekly, the last 20 minutes of the second weekly meeting the students are given a paragraph relevant to the Ottoman intellectual tradition and this is explained and analyzed by the instructor. This helps the student acquire the necessary imagery and tropes for them to understand, discuss, and contextualize the readings done in class.

Discussion sessions (second meeting of the week) and assignments are built around the way students access information through close reading and contextualization and how this allows them to better understand and analyze relevant scholarship. The students, led by the instructor, develop different skills through directed reading of primary sources, which include structural analysis, data-mining, engagement with arguments, prioritizing information. This, in turn, allows for discussion of core ideas in texts and sources as well as it develops a method to read and discuss historical and scholarly works.

The class focuses on a variety of material and textual products that were part of the diverse set of imperial discourses established by the Ottoman imperial court, bureaucrats, artists, religious leaders among others. consequently, every week the class focuses on a different type of material, to understand the different ways in which history and tradition can be interpreted. Some of these include textual sources, manuscripts (codicology), textiles, tiles and ceramics, as well as urbanization (maps, urban development, infrastructure). The students also visit the Penn Museum and the Kislak Center to have a direct experience with the material.

Students write two response papers focuses on one literary source (historical fiction as source) and one primary source in translation. In addition to this, the Midterm and Final exams are take-home exams consisting on 3 essay questions regarding the primary sources discussed in class throughout the first and second half of the semester respectively. Each question builds upon an analytical skill, namely, contextualization, structure and architectonics, traditional imagery and heuristics. This assignments help them prepare for a final essay that asks them to discuss the relevant scholarship of a topic of choice in relation to the sources available for its study. This extended essay requires the student to develop a sound understanding of the interconnection between available historical sources and historical questions, the production of historical narratives, and the means available to interpret and analyze them.

The focus on the imperial discourse vis-à-vis local challenges among classes that belonged to the Ottoman empire but continuously tried to change its form of governance allows the student to see the constant changes, negotiations and discussions between the imperial center, the populations of the empire, and the surrounding empires. Furthermore, the student becomes aware of the appearance of new sources that derived from new technologies, new trade routes and new interactions with other states and geographies. This is better understood in the process of contextualization that the student needs to do for the midterm and final exams as well as for the response papers.

The entire course focuses on conflicting discourses, both textual and visual (cities, armies, maps, tiles). The center of this discourse is change, transformation derived from challenges posed by neighboring states, by shifting and emerging classes within the empire, and the conquest of new territories, including new languages, traditions and historical heritages (Arab lands, the Persianate world, Egypt, etc.). This changes in the discourse are further negotiated as new technologies appear, and new commodities and substances (coffee, opium, tobacco), as well as new materials (paper, print, silver), become available. The student follows closely how different imperial agents and subjects incorporated these innovations into traditional forms of knowing the world (religious discussions, moral questions about technologies or permissible uses of drugs, emergence of new social spaces and transformation of the landscape). In this sense, the student becomes aware of the nature of knowledge in two different levels. Historically, it changes as people adapt to the world and try to make sense of it with the available linguistic and discursive tools (literally, the tension between history as past and tradition as a present that resist it). Historiographically, the student also reflects on how scholars build knowledge of the past by using the available primary sources and posing questions relevant to their present.