Emrah Sahin is a specialist in state formations, international operations, and ethno-religious interactions with a particular interest in the Middle East and Turkey since 1808. He received his Ph.D. from McGill University and is the recipient of an SSHRC Award in Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), an SHF International Research Award in Turkey (Sabanci Humanities Foundation), and the "Teacher of the Year" and "Undergraduate Research Mentorship" awards at the University of Florida. His first book Faithful Encounters is an archive-driven narrative of the Muslim-male-centralist responses to Christian-family-modernist missionaries in Ottoman lands from Greece to Syria -- and is critically acclaimed in scholarly venues such as American Historical Review and Journal of World Christianity. He also edited volumes on cultural exchanges, language pedagogies, and a non-fiction graphic novel, and published peer-reviewed articles in journals including the Journal of Historical Sociology (“Myth of the Eternal State”). While on a Global Fellowship at the University of Florida, he embarked on a second major research project simultaneously tracing Muslim travelers, Kurdish massacres, and the morality dialectics that gained currency in post-1870 periodicals housed in Istanbul, Cairo, and Isfahan. Emrah Sahin currently serves in the Center for European Studies, the Center for Global Islamic Studies, the Department of History, the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship, and as a college-wide student advisor and the coordinator of Department of Defense-funded Global Officer Program in Swahili and Turkish. Dr Sahin offers classic, novel, and transdisciplinary area-studies courses and honors reading seminars such as Modern Middle East, Islam and Turkey, A History of God, Global Cities, and Soccer Culture.
Selected Publications
- Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. Part of the McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion Series. Chicago, Kingston, London, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018
- “Sultan’s America: Lessons from Ottoman Encounters with the United States.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 39 (2014): 55-76
- “Ottoman Society.” In Andrea Stanton et al., eds, Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. California: SAGE, 2012, vol. I, 185-90
- “Construction of National Identities in Early Republics: A Comparison of the American and Turkish Cases.” The Journal of the Historical Society 10 (December 2010): 507-31 (co-authored with Timothy M. Roberts)
- “Home Away from Home: Early Turkish Migration to the United States Reflected in the Lives of Bayram Mehmet and HazimVasfi.” In Kemal Karpat and Deniz Balgamış, eds, Turkish Migration to the United States: From Ottoman Times to the Present. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, 87-101
Courses Offered
- Global and International Focus: International Studies Perspectives || Greece, Turkey, and the World (co-taught) || Senior Research Seminar in International Studies
- Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies: History of God (scheduled seminar) || Terror and Islam || Islam and Turkey || Contours of Ottoman History || Muslim Migrations || US in the Middle East || Money and the Bible
- European/Turkish Area-Studies: European Experience (co-taught) || History of Turks || Turkey and Europe || European Union
- Language and Literature Focus: Turkish Language (beginning to advanced levels) || Themes in Turkish || Ottoman Literature || A City of Two Tales: Istanbul
Research
Sahin examines the ways in which religious and cultural forces reflect and shape political and social encounters that take place within and beyond the national borders. In my research, I hope to interpret the traditional themes of religious studies through newer cross-cultural methods. I tend to adopt an interpretive approach by drawing a coherent narrative from multi-layered and thick descriptions that permeate the primary sources, and apply the multifaceted method by tracing the discourse of conflictive knowledge claims made by the parties involved.
Sahin’s first major research project is a socio-political study of how Muslim authorities and communities treat Christian foreigners. Recently published as a monograph titled, Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, it analyzes the production of an imperial-caliphate discourse on this matter. The core evidence for this book comes from imperial, provincial, and judicial records gathered from international archives. These sources also help to debunk the existing literature depicting Muslim authorities as rigid bureaucrats and Evangelical missionaries as idealistic reformers. To the current scholarly debate his findings contribute a detailed analysis of the Muslim politics along with a broader and deeper context for contemporary ethnic and religious tensions in the Middle East.
In his current and future research, Professor Sahin associates Turkic Politics and Islamic Identities with cultural, intellectual, transnational, and traditional inspirations derived from a wide range of sources. For instance, in an ongoing project titled Died Again Christians, he transcends the traditional boundaries of religion, anthropology, sociology, and global studies by way of exploring how and why a religious massacre in a remote Kurdish village of east Anatolia has recently engendered a global political discussion about Muslim ethno-religious identities. By drawing on original data, this project will offer a novel and interdisciplinary approach to why ethno-religious fanaticism tends to resurrect with poignant force in the Islamic World. This case under study involves multiple subjects including American, Arab, German, Kurdish, and Turkish nationals who are observant Muslims, Christians, or Christian converts, thus inviting oral interviews to be conducted on several sites alongside a critical look at court records and various local reports.