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Axis of Hope

Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders

By Catherine Z. Sameh

Political tensions between Iran and the United States in the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror have set the stage for Iranian women’s rights activists inside and outside Iran as they seek full...

Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya

An Ambivalent Modernism

By Brian L. McLaren

To be a tourist in Libya during the period of Italian colonization was to experience a complex negotiation of cultures. Against a sturdy backdrop of indigenous culture and architecture, modern metropolitan culture brought its systems...

Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus

By James P. Grehan

Damascus was for centuries a center of learning and commerce. Drawing on the city's dazzling literary tradition-a rich collection of poetry, chronicles, travel accounts, and biographical dictionaries-as well as on Islamic court records, James Grehan...

The Look of the Book

Manuscript Production in Shiraz, 1303-1452

By Elaine Wright

The Look of the Book assesses the role of the city of Shiraz in Iranian book production between the early fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. It is the first detailed analysis of all aspects of the...

Activists in Office

Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey

By Nicole F. Watts

Thousands of Kurdish politician-activists have been prosecuted and imprisoned, and hundreds have been murdered for espousing Kurdish political and cultural rights over the past twenty years. The risks are high, yet Pro-Kurdish political parties have...

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran

By Arash Khazeni

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran traces the history of the Bakhtiyari tribal confederacy of the Zagros Mountains through momentous times that saw the opening of their territory to the outside world....

International Architecture in Interwar Japan

Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku

By Ken Tadashi Oshima

After World War I, architects around the world aspired to transcend national boundaries that had been devastated by conflicts. The result was a flurry of artistic creativity. In Japan, young architects strove to create an...

A Moveable Empire

Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

By Resat Kasaba

A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier...

The Merchant Houses of Mocha

Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port

By Nancy Um

Gaining prominence as a seaport under the Ottomans in the mid-1500s, the city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen pulsed with maritime commerce. Its very name became synonymous with Yemen's most important...

Walls of Algiers

Narratives of the City through Text and Image

By Zeynep Celik, Julia Clancy-Smith, Frances Terpak

Walls of Algiers examines the historical processes that transformed Ottoman Algiers, the "Bulwark of Islam," into "Alger la blanche," the colonial urban showpiece - and, after the outbreak of revolution in 1954 - counter-model of...

Empire, Architecture, and the City

French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914

By Zeynep Celik

Winner of the 2010 Spiro Kostof Award (sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians)

Empire building and modernity dominate the history of the nineteenth century. The French and Ottoman empires capitalized on modern infrastructure and city...

Modernism and the Middle East

Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

By Sandy Isenstadt, Kishwar Rizvi

This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial...

Nationalizing Iran

Culture, Power, and the State, 1870-1940

By Afshin Marashi

When Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896, claimed the title Shadow of God on Earth, his authority rested on premodern conceptions of sacred kingship. By 1941, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi...

The New Woman in Uzbekistan

Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism

By Marianne Ruth Kamp

Winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize

Winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society History and Humanities Book Award

Honorable mention for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize Book Prize from the American Association...

The City’s Pleasures

Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century

By Shirine Hamadeh

The City's Pleasures is the first historical investigation of the tremendous changes that affected the fabric and architecture of Istanbul in the century that followed the decisive return of the Ottoman court to the capital...

Party Building in the Modern Middle East

By Michele Penner Angrist

Why was Turkey - alone of all the modern states that emerged from the Ottoman Empire - the only Middle Eastern country to evolve lasting competitive political institutions? While democratic processes grew steadily in Turkey...

Middle East Historiographies

Narrating the Twentieth Century

By Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, Y. Hakan Erdem

This collection of ten essays focuses on the way major schools and individuals have narrated histories of the Middle East. The distinguished contributors explore the historiography of economic and intellectual history, nationalism, fundamentalism, colonialism, the...

Ottoman Lyric Poetry

An Anthology

By Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Black, Mehmet Kalpakli

The Ottoman Empire was one of the most significant forces in world history and yet little attention is paid to its rich cultural life. For the people of the Ottoman Empire, lyrical poetry was the...

Modern Clan Politics

The Power of "Blood" in Kazakhstan and Beyond

By Edward Schatz

Edward Schatz explores the politics of kin-based clan divisions in the post-Soviet state of Kazakhstan. Drawing from extensive ethnographic and archival research, interviews, and wide-ranging secondary sources, he highlights a politics that poses a two-tiered...

The Martyrs of Karbala

Shi'i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran

By Kamran Scot Aghaie

This innovative study examines patterns of change in Shi’i symbols and rituals over the past two centuries to reveal how modernization has influenced the societal, political, and religious culture of Iran. Shi’is, who support the...