Absent Words? Sciences, Scientists, and Scientific Expertise in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

A. Tunç Şen is an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, specializing in the history of the Ottoman world from its beginnings in the 14th century through the early 20th century. His past and future publications focus on the history of sciences and divination, manuscript culture, the history of emotions, and the social history of scholarship. His forthcoming first book, based on his award-winning dissertation and tentatively titled Forgotten Experts: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600, examines what “scientific authority” and “expertise” meant in the early modern context. Şen is a member of an international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition (GHOST): Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities, funded by the European Research Council.