Didem Havlioglu, “Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History” (Syracuse UP, 2017)

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sorts of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth century Ottoman poet. It considers the question of what happens when a woman enters a field dominated by men; in this case, poetry. Using her own poetry and biographical dictionaries (the tezkire genre), Havlioglu contextualizes Mihri and tries to understand her as a product of her own time and as someone who understood her multiple roles in society well enough to subvert them.

Didem Havlioglu is Instructor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke. Her interests include Modern/Ottoman Language and Literature, Islamic Aesthetics, Women and Gender in the Middle East, Women Writers in the Intellectual History of the Middle East. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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