Suraiya Faroqhi


Suraiya Faroqhi, is a German scholar, Ottoman historian and a leading authority on Ottoman History.

Life

She was born in Berlin to a German mother and an Indian father in 1941. When studying history at Hamburg University, at age twenty-one she spent an academic year at Istanbul University as an exchange student. After completing her Dr. Phil. thesis in 1967, she studied Teaching English as a Second Language at Indiana University in Bloomington/Indiana, obtaining an MA for Teachers in 1970. As German universities require the publication of doctoral theses and her Dr. Phil. thesis appeared in 1970 as well, both diplomas bear the same date.
After a year at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis/St. Paul, she began to teach English at Middle East Technical University in Ankara in 1971, promoted to Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department a year later. In 1980, she became an üniversite doçenti in Turkey and in 1982, a Privatdozent at the Ruhr-Universität, Bochum. A full professorship at Middle East Technical University followed in 1986. At the end of 1987, she left Ankara after having accepted a professorship at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, where she taught until her retirement in 2007. After a term as a Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire/USA, she began to teach at Istanbul Bilgi University, where she was a full-time faculty member until 2017. Becoming an Emerita in 2017, she took up a position at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul. She was an H.A.R. Gibb Fellow at Harvard University, a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and a Visiting Bhagat Singh Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi/India.
In 1962-63, she arrived at a turning point in her life when she became a student of Ömer Lütfi Barkan, one of the founding fathers of modern Ottoman historiography and a member of the editorial board of Annales ESC. After reading volumes of this journal at Barkan’s recommendation, and Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II at a later stage, she felt that this was the type of historiography with which she could identify.
Throughout her career, she has focused on the history of Ottoman cities in the period before about 1850. She is particularly concerned with the hitherto underrepresented world of ordinary urbanites, in particular artisans, women, and slaves. This undertaking has often involved reading Ottoman documents ‘against the grain’ in order to tease out the actions and aspirations of the common people from texts, which for the most part, reflect the aims and interests of the sultans and their officials. However, it bears remembering that to denizens of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, large sections of this world continue to remain hidden.

Works

English