ABOUT

Abdurrahman Atçıl is an associate professor of history at Sabancı University, Istanbul. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2010 and has previously worked at Harvard Law School, Queens College of the City University of New York, and Istanbul Şehir University. He is particularly interested in questions of law, religion, and politics in the early modern Ottoman Empire. His first book, Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, details Muslim scholars’ transition from independent and cosmopolitan actors to Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats. His other published work is devoted to addressing such issues as the Ottoman-Safavid conflict, scholarly mobility, and theology and philosophy in the Islamic legal tradition. Atçıl is currently leading two major research projects. The first, OTTOLEGAL, funded by the European Research Council, examines the religio-legal opinions and sultanic decrees to investigate the formation of law in the Ottoman Empire between 1450 and 1650. The second project, Digital Tabaqat, funded by the Centre for Islamic Studies (İSAM) in Istanbul, introduces a pathbreaking approach to biographical data collection and analysis through its database, which allows researchers to identify and display associations between people, events, dates, and places across a range of biographical dictionaries.