The Fragile: A Social and Emotional History of Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

What happens to scholars' inner lives when a state turns learning and the academy into a centrally administered, hierarchical, and rigidly ranked career structure? My current book project is a study of scholarly life in the early modern Ottoman Empire that aims to shift the focus away from scholars' intellectual achievements to the lived experience of navigating an academic career. The rapid expansion and unprecedented formalization of the Ottoman learned establishment from the late fifteenth century onward created new opportunities for education and professional advancement. Still, it also produced increasingly rigid hierarchies, intense competition for appointments within the scholarly bureaucracy, financial insecurity, and repeated experiences of failure and exclusion. The project explores how these institutional structures shaped the emotional worlds of students and scholars. It asks how ambition, hope, anxiety, envy, resentment, humiliation, attachment, and disappointment became intertwined with the pursuit of knowledge and professional status. Its central figure is a sixteenth-century professor who wrote under the pen name Frail and taught in low- to mid-ranking colleges (madrasa) of the day. He wrote extensively about his education, travels, financial difficulties, professional disappointments, and relations with peers, patrons, and rivals. Reading his writings alongside official appointment registers, biographical dictionaries, archival petitions, letters, poems, manuscript marginalia, and other sources makes it possible to connect the intimate scale of an individual intellectual life to the larger structures of early modern (Ottoman) scholarly culture.

A. Tunç Şen, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, specializes in the social and cultural history of intellectual practices across the Ottoman Empire's long medieval-to-modern trajectory and its vast geographic expanse from the Balkans to the Middle East. In his research, Şen examines how people perceived their world, the frameworks through which they organized information and beliefs, and the social, political, economic, and emotional structures that both shaped and were shaped by their ways of knowing. He is the author of Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600 (Stanford University Press, 2025), as well as numerous articles on the history of science and divination, manuscript culture, the history of emotions, and the social history of education in the Ottoman and broader Islamicate world. He is currently working on two book projects. The first is a social and emotional history of early modern Ottoman scholarly culture, examined through the microhistory of a low-ranking college professor. The second traces the social and cultural history of Ottoman manuscripts that entered European collections as spoils of war seized by European soldiers and as booty captured by Mediterranean pirates.