What did it mean
to be "modern" in a rapidly changing Eurasian empire? This question
has animated the research of Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence
Professor Avi Rubin and Skidmore’s Associate Professor Murat C. Yildiz. While
Rubin has examined these shifts through the lens of legal reform and
bureaucratic halls, Yildiz has explored them in sports clubs and the city’s
public spaces. This public conversation brings together Rubin and Yıldız to
discuss two ends of the late Ottoman experience: the state’s effort to
institutionalize justice and order through law, and society’s aspiration to
forge a new "body" and identity through bodily culture and leisure.
Together, Rubin and Yildiz will explore why (Ottoman) history matters when
thinking about the present Middle East and explore how Ottomans did not merely
adopt foreign models but instead crafted a distinct local modernity of their
own whose legacies continue to live in today.
Avi Rubin earned his Ph.D. in History and
Middle East Studies from Harvard University (2006) before becoming a faculty
member in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev. A specialist in the socio-legal history of the late Ottoman Empire,
Rubin has published extensively on legal change in the modern era, exploring
themes such as codification, legal culture, political trials, and the rule of
law. His first monograph, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and
Modernity (2011), is a
pioneering, "law-in-action" study that revised our understanding of
nineteenth-century Ottoman legal reform. His second book, Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern
Political Trial: The Yildiz Case (2018), examines the emergence of a new culture of legalism
during the late Ottoman period. Building on this trajectory, his current
research explores the legalist foundations of modern Turkish autocracy by
tracing the continuities between the Hamidian regime and the early Republic.
Murat
C. Yildiz is Associate Professor in
the Department of History at Skidmore College. He is author of The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and
Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press,
2026). He serves as Assistant Editor of Arab Studies Journal and
as an Editorial Board Member of International Journal of the History of Sport.