HIST Seminar: “Love (mahabbet): An Emotion Providing the Meaning-making Mechanisms of Protection (hıfz) in early modern Ottoman Familial Relations”, Dr. Nil Tekgül, 5:00PM March 29 (EN)

You are cordially invited to a seminar titled “Love (mahabbet): An Emotion Providing the Meaning-making Mechanisms of Protection (hıfz) in early modern Ottoman Familial Relations” organised by the Department of History.

Date: 29.03.2022
Time: 17.00 (Ankara Time Zone)

Title: “Love (mahabbet): An Emotion Providing the Meaning-making Mechanisms of Protection (hıfz) in early modern Ottoman Familial Relations”

Speaker: Dr. Nil Tekgül

***This is an online event. To obtain Zoom link and password, please contact to the department.

The field of history of emotions is not regarded as a separate strand of history but rather inform every historical inquiry offering new explanations for human motivation. By drawing on recent research on the field of emotions, this paper investigates the concept of “protection” in Ottoman early modern familial relations and the emotions of love (mahabbet), and affection/sincerity (musafat) associated with it, offering a new approach to gender studies. For the early modern period, the relation between husbands and wives in Ottoman society was rather complimentary rather than being based on equality. This paper thus traces the emotion terms from both the judicial court records and advice manual Ahlak-i Ala’i written by Kınalızade (an Ottoman intellectual of the 16th century) in an effort to understand how women and men conceptualized this unequal but complimentary relation. I claim that it was emotions of love and affection which provided the meaning of “protection” as a contested concept. This paper also scrutinizes the transformation of the meanings attached to protection of wives by their husbands throughout 19th and early 20th century.

Biography

Dr. Tekgül graduated from Üsküdar American Academy for Girls in 1983. In 1987, she received her undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University Department of Economics. She obtained her MSF degree from Seattle University Albers School of Business and Administration in 1996 and MA degree from Bilkent University Department of History in 2011. Dr. Tekgül completed her PhD in 2016 with her thesis titled “A Gate to the Emotional World of Pre-modern Ottoman Society: An Attempt to Write Ottoman History from the Inside Out” from Bilkent University. In 2017-2018 she continued her studies in Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) as a visiting post-doc research scholar. Her main fields of interest include history of emotions, conceptual history and daily life in early modern Ottoman society. She published articles on a wide range of topics including Ottoman Tımar System, Provincial Courts, Politics of Emotion, Taxation Policies and daily lives of ordinary people. Her monograph titled Emotions in the Ottoman Empire: Politics, Society, Family in the Early Modern Era will be published by Bloomsbury in 2022. Dr. Tekgül teaches courses on Ottoman History and Ottoman Turkish in Bilkent University Department of History as a full-time instructor.