Kaya Şahin

Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of History and Adjunct Associate Professor of Central Eurasian Studies,
Indiana University Bloomington

Kaya Şahin (PhD in History, University of Chicago, 2007) is a historian of the early modern Ottoman
Empire, with a particular interest in history writing, governance, religious/confessional identity, and
ceremonies and rituals.

Şahin is the author of Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century
Ottoman World (2013; Turkish translation, 2014). He has written several journal articles and book
chapters on Ottoman and Byzantine apocalypticism, early modern Orientalism, comparative political
ideologies East and West, and various aspects of Ottoman political and cultural life in the 15th and
16th centuries. He is currently working on two monographs. The first is a biography of the Ottoman
sultan Süleyman (r. 1520-1566). The second is a history of Ottoman public ceremonies in the 15th
and 16th centuries. (Please see https://history.indiana.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/sahin_kaya.html for a
list of his publications.)

Şahin serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal
of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, and the I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History,
the editorial advisory board of the Renaissance Quarterly, the advisory board of the ARC Humanities
Press’ Connected Histories in the Early Modern World book series, and as an elected discipline
representative for the Islamic World at the Renaissance Society of America.

During his SCAS Fellowship, Şahin will work on the role of performativity in Ottoman political and
cultural life, and the linkages between public ceremonies and governance in an Ottoman as well as a
larger Eurasian context in the 15th and 16th centuries.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.