The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Huntington Library, the United States Consulate in Istanbul, and Boğaziçi University invite proposals for papers and workshops to be presented at a conference on “Ottoman and Atlantic Empires in the Early Modern World” to be held in Istanbul, Turkey, October 19-21, 2005.

The conference will focus on historically grounded cross-cultural, inter-cultural and comparative dimensions of two principal zones of imperial expansion in the Early Modern Era: the eastern Mediterranean in the aftermath of the 1453 conquest of Constantinople and the North Atlantic rim following the 1492 voyage of Columbus, through the early nineteenth century.

Conference sessions will take two forms: 1) groups of formal papers addressing common historical questions; and 2) workshops addressing methodological and historiographical issues. In both instances, sessions might coalesce around the following topics: early stages of empire building; cultural exchanges between empires and indigenous peoples; law and lawlessness; resistance to empire; and cultural constructs and identities.

Proposals for formal papers might deal with interactions between people residing in the Ottoman and/or Atlantic (and especially British and American) empires. They might include, but are not limited to, discussions of travelers and their accounts, political structures, commercial networks, social relationships, and questions of diversity and identity.

Workshops will focus on analyses of primary sources from both Ottoman and Atlantic worlds. The workshops will be informal, will build off of a series of (probably on-line) discussions between the participants, and will be considered as experiments in cross-cultural and/or comparative conversation. We envision a series of sessions that would allow Ottoman and Atlantic (especially British and American) scholars to work together to consider the most basic differences and commonalities in their fields by exploring key texts for what these reveal about the various empires and about the ways in which they have been or can be studied. Proposals for contributions to workshops should address a specific document or group of documents in your field. These may be newly-discovered or well-known. It is critical, though, that they be accessible to scholars in the other field (most obviously, this means that Ottoman documents must be translated into English).

The deadline for submission of proposals is August 2, 2004. Please send a proposal of no more than 500 words as well as a one-page curriculum vitae to the address below.