You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as “Contested Space in Holy Places from Palestine to the Horn of Africa at the Turn of the 20th Century” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 04 December 2025, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Venue: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room
Title: Contested Space in Holy Places from Palestine to the Horn of Africa at the Turn of the 20th Century”
Speaker: Mostafa Minawi, Cornell University.
Abstract:
Based on Prof. Minawi’s current book project, this talk deals with the global history of late-19th-century contest (holy) real estate in Jerusalem and its connection to the wider Ottoman and Ethiopian entanglement in a global inter-imperial competition for territorial expansion while attempting to maintain their sovereignty in the face of European colonial encroachment between 1885 and 1917.
Bio:
Mostafa Minawi is Professor of History at Cornell University. His first book, “The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz” (Stanford University Press, 2016), has been translated into Turkish and Arabic, and his latest, “Losing Istanbul”, was the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Prize in 2023, and has been translated into Turkish and is currently being translated into Arabic by the Arab Studies Institute in Doha. He has published a number of articles dealing with questions of imperialism, international law, and belonging in the Middle East, from Istanbul to the Horn of Africa. He has held several prestigious fellowships at the National Humanities Center Fellowship, the Remarque Institute, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University. Most recently, he was a Senior Global Fellow at Northwest University in Qatar and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University in Istanbul. He is currently working on his third monograph, tentatively titled “A Global History of a Roof Top in Jerusalem.”