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Michael Sheridan

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Michael D. Sheridan received his Ph.D. in Ottoman History from Bilkent University, with his dissertation entitled “‘I Curse No One without Cause’: Identity, Power, Rivalry, and Invective in the Early 17th-century Ottoman Court.” His research focuses on cultural history in both the Islamicate and the European contexts, using historical, literary, and ego texts of the early modern period in order to examine this period’s changing elite identities and factionalizations and the intense sociocultural tensions to which these changes gave rise.

He has published a book, Ottoman Explorations of the Nile (with Robert Dankoff and Nuran Tezcan), which is a translation and scholarly analysis of the 17th-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi’s journeys up the Nile River and the Nile map that he subsequently created or commissioned. Additionally, his study examining early 17th-century Ottoman invective in its historical and sociocultural context appears in the edited volume Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility, and Distrust in Pre-modern Ottoman Lands. He has also presented his work at numerous international conferences, including the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes (CIÉPO), the Gesellschaft für Turkologie, Osmanistik und Türkeistudien (GTOT), the International Congress of Ottoman Social and Economic History (ICOSEH), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). He is the translator and editor of a range of literary and historical texts, most prominently the work of Evliya Çelebi and the collected poetry of Sultan Mehmed II.

He was the recipient of a junior residential fellowship at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) in 2012–13, and has taught courses and seminars in the humanities, modern Turkish history, Ottoman and Turkish literature, and the English language.