Half-way through our previous season, we launched the Iran and Persian Studies series on Dissertation Reviews. Iran and Persian Studies will come back stronger this academic year, and together with the new Ottoman and Turkish Studies series, we will be posting lots of new dissertation reviews, “Fresh from the Archives” articles and “Talking Shop” pieces. Please do check out the Islamic Studies series too, which is dedicated to scholarship on Islam around the world. If you wish to participate in Dissertation Reviews, please click here to become a reviewer or to have your dissertation reviewed. You may also contact our Iran and Persian Studies editor, Assef Ashraf, or one of three dedicated Ottoman and Turkish Studies co-editors, Amaryllis Logotheti, Ileana Moroni, or Nikos Christofis. Our team at Dissertation Reviews is committed to the “global,” and if you are interested in starting a new series on a geopolitical region that we do not currently cover, please email our Editor-in-Chief Thomas Mullaney.
A glimpse of our fresh content
Christopher Ferrero, “The Iran Narrative: Ideas, Discourse, and Domestic Politics in the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy toward Iran: 1990–2003” (University of Virginia 2011), reviewed by Matthew Shannon (Temple University)
Derek Mancini-Lander, “Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd” (University of Michigan 2012), reviewed by Kaveh Hemmat (University of Chicago)
Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi, “Revolutions and Rough Cuts: Bodily Technologies for Regulating Sexuality in Contemporary Iran” (Columbia University 2013), reviewed by Shirin Ahmad-Nia (Tehran University)
Ram Baruch Regavin, “The Most Sovereign of Masters: The History of Opium in Modern Iran, 1850-1955” (University of Pennsylvania 2012), reviewed by Christoph Werner (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Yavuz Aykan, “Les acteurs de la justice à Amid et dans la province du Diyarbekir d’après les sicil provinciaux du 18ème siècle” (École des hautes études en sciences sociales 2012), reviewed by Marinos Sariyannis (Mediterranean Institute Crete)
Ceren Gülser Ilikan Rasimoglu, “The Foundation of a Professional Group: Physicians in the Nineteenth Century Modernizing Ottoman Empire (1839-1908)” (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi 2012), reviewed by Seçil Yilmaz (City University of New York)
Guliz Belcher, “Journey from Islamism to Conservative Democracy: The Politics of Religious Party Moderation in Turkey” (University of Massachusetts Amherst 2012), reviewed by Evren Altinkas (Avrasya Üniversitesi)
Hasan Karatas, “The City as a Historical Actor: The Urbanization and Ottomanization of the Halvetiye Sufi Order by the City of Amasya in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” (University of California, Berkeley 2011), reviewed by Theoharis Stavridis (University of Cyprus)
Plus many others…
Meet the editors
Assef Ashraf (Iran and Persian Studies) is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. His dissertation, “From Khan to Shah: The Rise of a Qajar Political and Court Culture in Iran, 1785-1848,” examines the efforts by early Qajar rulers to consolidate their power through kinship ties, marriage alliances, and patronage of the arts. More broadly, his interests include the early modern and modern history of Iran, early modern Muslim empires, travel literature, and the culture and economy of gift-exchange.
Amaryllis Logotheti (Ottoman and Turkish Studies) is a PhD candidate in contemporary history at Panteion University of Athens. Her dissertation is entitled “Religion and Politics in Greece and Turkey at the Beginning of the Cold War: The Periodicals Zoe and Büyük Doğu” and focuses on the interaction between state and religion discourse in the public sphere. She has published articles on political Islam and presented papers about the role of religion in the Mediterranean world, state anticommunism and the triangle Turkey, Greece, Cyprus.
Ileana Moroni (Ottoman and Turkish Studies) is currently completing her PhD in History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. Her dissertation, “Imperial Nation: Constructing a Modern Ottoman Political Community in the Aftermath of the 1908 Revolution,” draws on theories of nationalism and citizenship, placing late Ottoman history in broader discussions on empire and on the current issue of a post-national or multicultural citizenship.
Nikos Christofis (Ottoman and Turkish Studies) received his PhD from Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden University in 2015. His dissertation has the title From Socialism via Anti-Imperialism to Nationalism. EDA – TİP: Socialist Contest over Cyprus. He edited and annotated a Turkish grammar (in Greek), and he is reworking his postgraduate thesis for publication, entitled Demonizing the Other: Greek Views on Turkey during the Asia Minor Campaign, 1919-1922. He has published articles and book reviews in edited volumes and academic journals in Greek, English, Turkish and Spanish. Some of his latest articles are “Lieux de Memoire and the ‘Invention of Resistance’ as Counter-Memory in the Greek and Turkish Left.” and “Turkey, Cyprus and the Arab Uprisings,” both in collected volumes. He is also one of the reviewers and members of the editorial board of the e-journal Athens Journal of History.
Image: Chaldiran Battlefield monument. Photograph by Malikek. Wikimedia Commons.
2 comments
so how can we read the dissertations?
We only feature the reviews of dissertations, and not the dissertations themselves. There are a variety of means to find dissertations, depending upon the situation. Some authors make their dissertations available via databases like Proquest. In other cases, university departments maintain their own databases of dissertations defended by their own PhDs (which, in turn, can either be databases made open to the public, or open only to members of the specific university in question). Still other cases involve scholars who make their dissertations available on their own personal or professional websites. In other cases, dissertations are placed under “embargo” by the author for a set number of years, and are not accessible. In these cases, it is entirely at the discretion of the author if s/he would be willing to share the dissertation with particular individuals on a case-by-case basis. However, Dissertation Reviews in no way and under no circumstances ever circulates dissertations. We deal only in reviews.