Call for Papers

Ottoman Mobilities and Interactions

Symposium, 13-14 April 2026

Istanbul, Türkiye

Investigating the Ottoman Empire as a dynamic web of circulation in which people, objects, and ideas continually reshaped the imperial fabric.

The British International Research Institutes (BIRI), in partnership with Sabancı University, invite paper proposals for a symposium organised as part of the Ottoman Mobilities and Interactions project.

This symposium posits mobility as a constitutive force in Ottoman history, rather than a passive byproduct of empire. We invite papers that approach the Ottoman world not as a static territorial unit but as a dynamic space defined by connectivity and interaction. Within this vast network, the movement of people, ideas, and objects did not merely unfold across a pre-existing imperial landscape; it actively reshaped it. By examining the interplay between fluid mobility and imperial infrastructures, the symposium invites scholars to explore how flows of commodities, cultural forms, and institutional knowledge mediated governance, generated new social hierarchies, and produced complex transimperial entanglements.

The symposium welcomes research from across the breadth of the Ottoman era. From early modern networks of circulation to later transformations in transport and border regimes during the long nineteenth century, it aims to examine how these dynamics reshaped the “Ottoman” experience across regions as diverse as the Balkans, Anatolia, the Mediterranean, the Southwest Asia, and North and East Africa. Drawing on history, art history, anthropology, archaeology, and related fields, the symposium seeks to map the flows that connected the empire internally and linked it to the broader world. Contributors may, for example, examine tensions between the fluidity of movement and the state’s evolving efforts to document, categorise, and control it, or develop empirically grounded case studies that draw on diverse primary sources to situate Ottoman mobilities within broader regional or global contexts.

Check details and download the Call for Papers below:

Submission deadline is January 23, 2026.