On October 2nd, 2024, SHIFA-ANA team members Nükhet Varlık, Zeynep Akçakaya, Akarsu Melike Demirkol, and Tunahan Durmaz presented “SHIFA-ANA: Healing Histories of Death and Disease in Anatolia” to commence the SHIFA-ANA lecture series! The SHIFA-ANA team presented at ANAMED, Beyoğlu to discuss their respective research to audience members across the world, both in person and online.
Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark. Her research focuses on disease, death, medicine, and public health in the Ottoman Empire. Her first book, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Turkish translation: Akdeniz Dünyasında ve Osmanlılarda Veba, 1347-1600), is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. It was awarded Middle East Studies Association’s 2016 Albert Hourani Book Award, the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s 2016 M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize, the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean’s 2017 Dionisius A. Agius Prize, and the American Association for the History of Medicine’s 2018 George Rosen Prize. She is the editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean, a collection of articles on the social, cultural, and political responses to epidemics in the post-Black Death Islamic Mediterranean. Together with Lori Jones, Varlık is co-editor of Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Perspectives From Across the Mediterranean and Beyond.
Varlık has authored numerous articles and book chapters addressing different aspects of disease, death, and medicine in Ottoman society (see here). Her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study-Princeton, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Research Institute in Turkey, Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, and Turkish Cultural Foundation. From 2018 to 2022, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Together with Ali Yaycıoğlu, Varlık serves as co-editor of Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature, and Knowledge. She is co-convener of History of Infectious Disease in the Islamicate World Working Group.
Zeynep Akçakaya is a historian of agriculture, economy, and environment in the Ottoman Empire of the 19th Century. Her scholarly focus includes global environmental history, Ottoman agricultural history, and rural economies. She received her BA degree (2009), MA degree (2012), and PhD (2019) from the History Department of Boğaziçi University. In her master’s thesis, she focused on agricultural economy and primary education in Thessaloniki during the reign of Abdulhamid II. She completed her PhD with the thesis titled “Agriculture and Agricultural Knowledge in Bursa and Mihaliç (Karacabey) in the Nineteenth Century,” under the co-supervision of Assoc. Prof. Yücel Terzibaşoğlu and Assoc. Prof. Zühre Aksoy. In 2018, she received a scholarship under the ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey) Turkish Fellowship Program. The author has published articles in Kebikeç, Turkish Historical Review and Agricultural History Review journals. Her recent scholarly focus is on the history of animals and understanding long-term dynamics of human-non-human interactions.
Akarsu Melike Demirkol is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Classical Ottoman Literature at Boğaziçi University. She is interested in micro-environments of historical cities and how they’re created – as related to cultural history. She has been traveling around İstanbul with a group of people to discover old cemeteries in İstanbul – a journey that recently culminated in NECRO-IST. Prior to her master’s studies, Demirkol earned her bachelor’s degrees in Department of History and Department of Political Science and International Relations (double major) at Boğaziçi University.
Tunahan Durmaz is a Ph.D. candidate in Department of History at European University Institute, Florence. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned his B.A. in History with a minor in Architecture from Middle East Technical University and an M.A. in History at Sabancı University.
His research interests include social, cultural, and political aspects of disease and illness in the early modern Ottoman world. Emerging at the intersection of histories of knowledge and history of medicine, his dissertation project “Of Bodily Fluids, Madness, and Fever: Many Ways of Grappling with Diseases in the Ottoman Healing Domain (1640-1691)” explores the ways of knowing and understanding diseases in the Ottoman world from the 1640s to the 1690s.