Faculty Member, PhD

Cihangir Gündoğdu

Book Chapter

Drol and Bobby: Nonhuman Animal Representations in the Late Ottoman Fiction


This volume addresses its reader after Covid, a time when the distinction between
“the fantastic” or “the virtual” and “the real” was blurred and what man would have
thought to be a part of an American science fiction movie, became a real experience.
A viral attack blocking life globally and a half online life experience thereafter... While
each essay, in their specific contexts, explores “the nonhuman bodies”, it should be
once again noted that this volume was inspired by all of the inhabitants of the World
that are inevitably connected by geographical relation and physical interaction as
well as through collective traumas incorporated into individual stories.
The essays in this volume focus on the relationship between human and nonhuman
bodies while offering in-depth analyses and various insights on their specific
subjects, exploring transformed contexts, literary traditions, and genres, guided by
rich theoretical engagements with posthumanism, ecocriticism, and digital humanities.
As our writers’ essays speak to one another, the whole collection reflects on the
notion of “connection” within the universe. https://www.peterlang.com/docu...

Drol and Bobby: Nonhuman Animal Representations in the Late Ottoman Fiction

Journal Articles

Luigi Mongeri: A reformist and expert on "Oriental Insanity" in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

This article focuses on the early career of Luigi Mongeri, who was appointed as the chief physician to the Süleymaniye Mental Asylum in 1856 to treat mental illness and improve the living conditions of mentally ill patients in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It focuses on Mongeri's early career in Italy, investigates his involvement in Ottoman imperial patronage networks and their subsequent effects on his career, and finally explores the reform program he implemented at Süleymaniye. While in the Ottoman Empire, Mongeri appeared as a reformist who claimed to improve the living conditions and treatment of patients by the use medical statistics, abolishing the use of shackles, etc. At the same time in Europe—and especially in France, which was one of the important centers of alienist medicine at the time— he presented himself as an expert on "oriental insanity,” a claim which gained him access to international medical circles and organizations. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pu...

Luigi Mongeri: A reformist and expert on

Ottoman death registers (Vefeyât Defterleri) and recording deaths in Istanbul, 1838–1839

This article presents an analysis of the first recognisably modern-style death registers in the Ottoman Empire. These were produced, in 1838–9, as a result of the state’s reaction to the cholera pandemic of 1831. This article shows how these registers were designed and structured, how they differed to those that preceded and came after them and so occupied a key point in the transition to the medicalisation of death and the import of Western-style statistical analysis. The article demonstrates how these registers offer details that can be used to build a picture of the social, economic and demographic profile of death in Istanbul in these years. https://www.tandfonline.com/do...

Ottoman death registers (Vefeyât Defterleri) and recording deaths in Istanbul, 1838–1839

Dogs Feared and Dogs Loved: Human-Dog Relations in the Late Ottoman Empire

The current study investigates human-animal relations with a specific focus on the case of dogs in the late Ottoman Empire. It contextualizes the new type of animal-human relations against the backdrop of the Ottoman modernization efforts, which took the form of institutional, legal, political and social reforms, and relates the adoption of dogs as pet (companion) animals to the global trends of keeping pets in Western Europe. In so doing, it scrutinizes the various religious, medical and professional perspectives concerning dogs and the human world in the late Ottoman Empire; the purchase and transfer of breed dogs from Europe and the middle classes’ responses to this new form of relationship; and finally, the dissemination of pet-keeping culture and practices among Ottoman upper and middle classes.https://brill.com/view/journal...

Dogs Feared and Dogs Loved: Human-Dog Relations in the Late Ottoman Empire

The state and stray dogs in late Ottoman Istanbul: from unruly subjects to servile friends

The present article situates the systemic efforts to annihilate stray dogs within the wider picture of Ottoman modernizing reforms in the nineteenth century. The period under investigation witnessed an increasing desire on the part of the modern Ottoman state to control and reform disenfranchised human and animal groups, which were believed to jeopardize public order, security and hygiene. These groups – beggars, orphans and the unemployed – were identified as actors irreconcilable with the modern image that the reforming bureaucracy and modernizing elites sought to project. In the face of increasing challenges from European powers, they were the epitome of underdevelopment and backwardness. Ottoman elites and official authorities therefore proposed and implemented institutional measures in the form of forced labor, reformatories or deportation to reform the conditions of these groups, segregate them from the greater public and discipline them. In the modern period, along with the proposals that called for the removal of dogs, modernizing intellectuals and professionals proposed alternative plans to render non-human animals beneficial to human needs and the modern state's expectations. https://www.tandfonline.com/do...

The state and stray dogs in late Ottoman Istanbul: from unruly subjects to servile friends

Book Reviews

Kent F. Schull, “Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity,” 

Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 77, Nisan (2017). 

Kent F. Schull, “Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity,” 

Julia Philipps Cohen, “Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era,” 

The Journal of Ottoman Studies, No. 48, 2016, pp. 490-494.

Julia Philipps Cohen, “Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era,” 

Umut Uzer, “An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity,” 

Turkish Studies, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683849.2016.1222694.

Umut Uzer, “An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism: Between Turkish Ethnicity and Islamic Identity,” 

Nazan Maksudyan, “Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire,”

Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 77, Nisan (2017). 

Nazan Maksudyan, “Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire,”