Kaya Şahin, Associate Professor of History, Central Eurasian Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, presents on his research project, "A Performative Empire: Ottoman Imperial Ceremonies, 1520-1566," to an interdisciplinary group of scholars, artists, and scientists comprised of fellows, guest faculty and students. He is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, with a particular interest in the institutional and ideological foundations of the Ottoman imperial praxis, comparative studies of early modern Eurasian empires, Ottoman and modern Turkish historiography, and inter-cultural exchanges and interactions in early modern Eurasia. He is currently working on the role of performativity in Ottoman political and cultural life, and the linkages between public ceremonies and governance in an Ottoman as well as a larger Eurasian context in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Professor Şahin is the author of Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World (2013; Turkish translation, 2014). He has written ten journal articles and book chapters on Ottoman and Byzantine apocalypticism, early modern Orientalism, Ottoman governance, comparative political ideologies East and West, and various aspects of Ottoman political and cultural life in the 15th and 16th centuries. He is currently co-editing a special issue of the Radical History Review ("Pre-modern Radicalisms/Radical Pre-Modernisms"), and a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies ("Early Modern Islamic Cities"). He serves on the advisory board of the ARC Humanities Press’ Connected Histories in the Early Modern World book series, the editorial advisory board of the Renaissance Quarterly, the editorial collective of the Radical History Review, and the Indiana University Press Faculty Board.
 

Professor Şahin is the recipient of a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the Newberry Library (2010-2011), a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research (2012-2013), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2015-2016). He recently received funding to co-direct, in Summer 2017, an NEH Summer Institute entitled "Beyond East and West: the Early Modern World, 1400-1800." Şahin is an elected discipline representative for the Islamic World at the Renaissance Society of America, and an elected member of the Committee on Committees at the American Historical Association./p>