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Leslie Peirce's Teaching and Research Interests

My scholarship has focused on the Ottoman empire in the early modern period, tacking back and forth between the culture and practice of sovereignty and the lives of individuals living in the empire. My first book, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, explores  the nature and practice of Ottoman dynastic sovereignty. This book addresses the reproduction of political power within a family context, the shift of the Ottoman polity from one organized for conquest to an administrative empire, and the public expressions of imperial rectitude, in particular patronage and philanthropy. Challenging western stereotypes of harem women as powerless except for their seductive charms, the ample primary sources on the subject of the sultans’ concubines, wives, and daughters—salary registers, chronicles, letters, imperial edicts,  property deeds—make it obvious that women, especially in their role as imperial mothers, exercised formative influence on the evolution of Ottoman political culture.

For my second project, I decided to leave the dynastic center and take up the study of provincial society and culture, in large part because of a desire to work with court records, one of the few sources that enable us to recover the voices of ordinary subjects of the empire, who left virtually no memoirs, letters, novels, etc. The resultant book, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab, is a microhistorical study of gender and legal culture in a provincial city located in northern Syria (today a part of Turkey). In writing this book, I realized that it was impossible to ignore the imperial center. Dealing with issues of justice, negotiation, and coercion, this book focuses in part on the ways in which both the ruling regime and a very ordinary province approached the processes of provincial incorporation into the 16th-century empire.

Recently, I have begun to work on a larger canvas, attempting to address the lack of studies of Ottoman society and culture accessible to an interested public readership or to world/comparative history courses. Rather than a chronological or comprehensive history of the empire, the book I am currently working (tentatively entitled The Ottoman World) takes up various aspects of the social, spiritual, material, and sexual history of the pre-modern empire. Another work-in-progress, an outgrowth of my second book, explores the evolution of what I call “the legal harem”—the study over time of domestic gender regimes through the lens of imperial law. A future project is a study of the meaning for regional and imperial history of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.

My teaching interests focus primarily on the regions and peoples that were subject to, rivals of, and influences on Ottoman cultural, legal, social, and political history—not only the Middle East as we think of it today, but also the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, Iran, and parts of Africa. I also teach courses that integrate the Ottoman region with other histories and places. At the undergraduate level, I have taught both broad introductory surveys as well as advanced courses focusing on gender, law and Ottoman society; orthodox religion, mysticism, and sovereignty; the legacies of the Mongols (especially in Iran and Anatolia); Spanish and Ottoman empires (co-taught); history through the lenses of fiction and travel narrative; and harems and court cultures in comparative perspective. Most of  these courses work extensively with primary sources and where possible with visual sources. At the graduate level, my teaching focuses primarily on pre-modern Ottoman studies.

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