A three-week institute in Istanbul, Turkey, for twenty-five school teachers on the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, and modern Turkey.
The Making of the Modern World, a general education world history program at the University of California, San Diego, has designed a new institute to take place in Istanbul, Turkey. It traces the city's more than 3,000-year history from the Greek city of Byzantion (Byzantium) to its transformation into Constantinople, the Christian "New Rome" of the East, to its next phase as an Ottoman Muslim imperial capital until the twentieth century when it reached its current status, not as an imperial or national capital, but as Turkey's largest city. Additionally, it provides participants with a better understanding of a city and region that have long functioned as a crossroad of regional and world history. Principal faculty include Matthew T. Herbst (University of California, San Diego); Byzantine historians Raymond Van Dam (University of Michigan) and Anthony Kaldellis (Ohio State University); humanities professor Stefan Stantchev (Arizona State University); Ottoman historian Hasan Kayali (University of California, San Diego); architectural historian Zeynep Çelik (New Jersey Institute of Technology); world historian Robert W. Strayer (State University of New York College at Brockport); and Turkish historian Sinan Ciddi (Georgetown University). Core readings include Ray Van Dam, Rome and Constantinople; Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire; Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe; Donald Quataert, Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922; and C.V. Findley, The Turks in World History. Morning sessions from Monday through Thursday are taken up with lectures and discussions of institute readings. Afternoons are devoted to site visits. Friday sessions are reserved for participant discussion and small-group curricular activities.
Faculty: Zeynep Çelik, Sinan Ciddi, Matthew T. Herbst, Anthony Kaldellis, Hasan Kayali, Stefan Stantchev, Robert Strayer, Raymond Van Dam
