PODCAST – Episode 27: The Civilisationist Present

Alan Mikhail speaks to Bryony Harris about the place of plague, quarantine and environmental history in Ottoman Egypt.

William Stroebel introduces Jonathan Conlin to the stories Lausanne tried to silence, that combined scripts and vocabularies in ways that challenged philologists' obsession with linguistic purity and authorial intent.

Özge Baykan Calafato introduces Julia Secklehner and Enno Maessen to her work exploring the role of photography in developing modern Turkish citizenship.

Peter Hill talks to Charles Ough about Dr Mikha’il Mishaqa, the Mount Lebanon-born polymath and US Vice Consul in Damascus whose long life encompassed some of the most important events of the tumultuous nineteenth-century in Syria and Egypt, culminating in the 1860 massacre of the Christians of Damascus in which Mishaqa narrowly escaped with his life.

Bariş Altan introduces Julia Secklehner to Cahide Tamer, a pioneer in architectural restoration and one of the first women architects in Turkey. Recently rescued, her archive fills a gap in the story of Istanbul's historic landmarks, while her example of courage gives inspiration to today's preservationists.

Long before the Turkish State Opera opened in 1949, Halide Edip Adıvar was mong those imagining what Turkish opera might sound like. In this conversation Jonathan Conlin asks Ici Vanwesenbeeck to explain how this remarkable polymath conceived of an opera that was neither "alla franca" nor "alla turca".

Can Eyüp Çekiç and Enno Maessen revisit liberal internationalist David Davies' 1919 proposal to establish the League of Nations in Constantinople, making that city the seat of a truly international order, an order that the League failed to establish in Geneva.

Jonathan Conlin invites Samuel Foster to explain the rationale behind his new module on "Europe in the Era of the Great War" and report on how students have engaged with imagology and uncomfortable analogies with their own times.

Ozan Ozavci talks with Ismee Tames about her ongoing research into stateless people after World War I, uncovering the communities of care that stateless individuals created to rebuild their lives.

Eugene Rogan and Ozan Ozavci discuss the 1860 massacres in Damascus, the subsequent restoration of peace in Syria, and the insights this turbulent history may offer to Syrians navigating today's challenges.