Duygu Yıldırım
@duyguyildirim
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. PhD from Stanford. Natural history and medicine in the early modern Mediterranean. Forthcoming book: A History of Uncertainty.
I am so honored and delighted to have my first book talk at Penn State. So grateful for the invitation, and I’m very much looking forward to it!
“This year, FEEGI will award two research grants of $1000 each to support travel to archival or other field sites. This award is open to all FEEGI members in good standing but is intended especially for graduate students, independent scholars, and untenured faculty.”
I am teaching Food, Health, and Society this fall, and these are some of the assigned readings 🍽️ 🍅🍇🧆🍬🫖
And here is the table of contents: We will walk through the many lives of tulips, palm trees, sea coconuts, coffee, mummies and those who remade knowledge about them: naturalists, physicians, flower breeders, bazaar artists, Orientalist scholars, and enslaved Muslims.
So happy to finally share the news that my book, “A History of Uncertainty: Science between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe,” will be out in Spring 2027 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. I still can't believe it's now beyond my hands and on its way to meeting its readers.
A smiling snake with sunglasses from the 17th century (or maybe I'm just a bit jet-lagged).
My review of Robert Morrison’s “Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe,”in Isis: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/74…
Two of the many images that will be featured in my forthcoming book. So this is really happening!
Excited to share my fall course: Food, Health, and Society in the Middle East! 🍎🍉🧄🥫☕️🍽️
Western-style illustration of female reproductive organs in a 17th-century Ottoman manuscript on anatomy.
An interesting imagery of “a Turk” in Emily Dickinson’s poem, “she died at play”
First day at I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. An extraordinary place to work as an academic, or simply to be mesmerized by the atmosphere to get inspired (peak Renaissance energy)
I’d heard so much praise for this book and finally found time to read it. It’s a fascinating read that pushes us to reconsider the Eurocentric nature of Marxist accounts of production that often erase the history of medieval slavery.
Just submitted my book for peer review. It has grown into something quite different from my dissertation with new research, thinking, and lots of writing, supported by a postdoctoral fellowship and an ACLS fellowship. Grateful to those who believed in this project from the start.
Historians of science and art historians: has anyone written about why some flower illustrations were left uncolored in Fuchs’ De historia stirpium? I have some hypotheses, but I'd love to know if there's already an argument or discussion on this.
In the early modern Ottoman Empire, the most valued tulips featured long, pointed petals and slender forms in contrast to the rounded varieties preferred in Europe. 🌷
The book’s intro is ready to go… The final title might still change slightly, but for now it’s: “Uncertain Knowledge: The Science of Making Relevance between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe”
Academic books now come with inaccessible price tags for many students and declining production quality. This is a brand new book from a highly respected press, and this is the material quality we are getting…
The 2025 HSS Annual Meeting Program is now available! We will be there with our session, “Beyond Botany: Plant Knowledges in Asian Studies” organized by wonderful Marjan Wardaki ✨
Planning to add this new book to my fall course, "Ottomans and the World, 1300–1800."
Just added this beautiful book to my growing collection of historical works on flowers and gardens 🪷
When you’ve made it enough to have your own section in a secondhand bookstore, but not enough for them to spell your name right: “Orphan Pamuk”
Excited to be at Harvard's I Tatti as a Berenson Fellow for the next academic year—and so looking forward to returning to Florence!
I asked ChatGPT to identify this painting, and it claimed it was from the late Ottoman Empire… Well, it’s not quite ready for historical analysis. Or maybe it’s simply giving the answers it predicts I want to hear.
This painting by Jan Lievens was mistakenly attributed to Rembrandt in the 18th century; and was long believed to be a portrait of Sultan Süleyman. (from “Rarities of These Lands”)