Hamadeh, Shirine

Rice University

Research Topic: Istanbul, City of Bachelors: An Urban History From Below

Dr. Hamadeh is an Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She is the author of The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2007), which appeared in Turkish with İletişim Press, in 2010, and is currently coediting Early Modern Istanbul, a Brill Companion Series volume, with Çiğdem Kafescioğlu. She was a professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, May 2016), the Alfred H. Howell Visiting Chair in History at the American University of Beirut (2010–11) and is the recipient of several grants, including the Getty Research Foundation Grant (2005–06). Her areas of interest are in early modern and modern Ottoman cities and architecture; public culture and public spaces; the urban underworld; and artistic connections in the early modern world. Her ANAMED book project, “Istanbul, City of Bachelors: an Urban History from Below“ takes as vantage point the figure of the migrant-bachelor (bekâr) to address the urban space and foreground everyday spatial agency in Istanbul’s eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century history. It is a study of bachelors’ spaces, architecture, and social networks, which reflects on questions of governance and daily life, inclusion and exclusion, and politics of urban space.