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Faculty Seminar Series

Istanbul as a Multicultural Imperial Capital

Arab Istanbulites at the Turn of the 20th Century

Speaker: Mostafa Minawi

A man with short dark hair and a trimmed beard, wearing a dark blazer over a white collared shirt, standing against a plain light-colored background, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression.

Mostafa Minawi is an Associate Professor of History and the Founder of the Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies initiative at Cornell University. He is the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award in 2023 for his book Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire. Currently, he is a fellow at the National Humanities Center in the United States.

ABSTRACT
This talk offers an intimate history of the empire, following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. It focuses on the lived experience of a multi-ethnic ruling class in imperial Istanbul and the end of multicultural spaces in the Ottoman Empire as the age of ethnonationalism takes gold.

This event will take place in room 0A13 at Georgetown University in Qatar