In Conver­sation:
Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem

SALT Galata

Zeynep Çelik will engage in a conversation with Edhem Eldem on the study and writing of history, using her recent Turkish publication İmparatorluk, Mimari ve Kent: Osmanlı Fransız Karşılasmaları, 1830-1914 (SALT, 2012) as a launching-pad. Focusing mainly on the late Ottoman Empire, but taking other comparable contexts into consideration as well, Çelik and Eldem will discuss theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues pertaining to the history of visual culture, architecture, and cities. The issues that will be addressed include interdisciplinary research, interpretation, documents, their uses and abuses, approaches to historiography, shifting vocabularies, and trendiness. Opening the discussion to the audience, Çelik and Eldem hope to turn this event into an open forum to underline key developments and problems in the discipline.

Zeynep Çelik
Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her publications include The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (1986); Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs (1992); Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (1997); Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (2008); and several co-edited volumes, most recently Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 (2011), in collaboration with Zainab Bahrani and Edhem Eldem.

Edhem Eldem
Professor of History at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. He has published French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (1999), A History of the Ottoman Bank (1999); The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, with Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters (1999); Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (2004); Death in Istanbul: Death and Its Rituals in Ottoman-Islamic Culture (2005); Consuming the Orient (2007); and Osman Hamdi Bey Sözlüğü (2010). He has curated a number of exhibitions on the Ottoman Bank; paper money; Galata; Ottoman medals and decorations; the Ottoman culture of death; and popular Orientalism.

The conversation will be held in Turkish.