Episode 445 with Mary Roberts hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The line between Orientalist and Ottoman painting might at first seem clear. But in this episode, historian Mary Roberts argues that such distinctions are in fact complicated, drawing on her recent book Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. She explains how Istanbul became a global center of production, circulation, and exhibition of visual culture in the nineteenth century. Ottomans and Orientalists both contended and connected with each other--whether in Pera or in the palace--and Roberts discusses how these networks of patronage and apprenticeship eventually led to works that were produced in Istanbul ending up all around the world. There they became defined as Orientalist, but Roberts unearths the more tangled genealogy of their production, as well as the relevance of audience in these characterizations.  « Click for More »

Episode 346 with Jan Haenraets hosted by Nir Shafir and Polina Ivanova Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Over the course of the seventeenth century, Kashmir became a valley adorned with gardens as Mughal emperors and nobles built garden after garden across the valley floor and mountainous landscape. In this episode, we speak with landscape architect and preservation specialist Jan Haenaerts on his research into the history of these gardens. We discuss not only their historical formation and usage of these spaces but also how they differed from the more well known Mughal gardens surrounding the Taj Mahal and Humayun's tomb. In the second half of the episode we also explore the difficulty of conserving historical gardens and landscapes in general and how this occurs in conflict areas such as Kashmir. « Click for More »

Episode 309 with Ahmet Ersoy hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Photography came to the Ottoman empire almost as soon as it was invented in Europe. Over subsequent decades, however, techniques improved, cameras got cheaper and more portable, and photographic production, circulation, and collection in Ottoman lands moved outside of the rarefied circles of the elite studios and the state. In this episode, Ahmet Ersoy discusses one of the main media for this kind of vernacular photography--the illustrated journals of the late Ottoman empire. What can understanding the circulation of images in this form help us to understand about history, identity, and print culture in the late Ottoman Empire, as well as about how to study photography itself? « Click for More »

Episode 298 with Deniz Türker hosted by Taylan Güngör Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud A handful of obscure archival fragments from Sultan Abdülhamid II’s imperial library in Yıldız have revealed a curious architectural practice that took place in the urban gardens of members and officials of the Ottoman court: they had a penchant for imported chalets. In this episode, Deniz Türker discusses her research on how this relatively niche fad for importation quickly shifted to widespread local prefabrication in the last decades of the nineteenth century. With the entrepreneurial oversight of production facilities in Istanbul, a larger swath of the capital’s population began to find ways to express their domestic tastes in an extremely competitive spirit on Istanbul’s expanding suburbs. In tracing these practices through state archives, newspapers, novel, and photographs, Türker also proposes some preliminary answers to the scarcity of original architectural drawings in the Ottoman archives. « Click for More »

with Ahmet Ersoy hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What happens when we encounter "Orientalist" aesthetics outside the West? In the late nineteenth century, a cosmopolitan group of Ottoman architects turned to modern forms of art history writing to argue that synthesis and change stood at the heart of a particularly "Ottoman" architectural aesthetic. Working together, these writers produced the first text of modern art history writing in the Ottoman empire, the Usul-ı Mi’marî-yi Osmanî or The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture. This volume was published simultaneously in Ottoman Turkish, French and German for the Universal Exposition or World's Fair in Vienna in 1873. In this episode, Ahmet Ersoy explores the making of this text, its arguments, and its implications for understanding the relationship of the late-Tanzimat Ottoman Empire with Europe, its own cosmopolitan "hyphenated-Ottoman" intellectuals, and historical imagination. « Click for More »

with Armen T. Marsoobian hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Interest in Ottoman photography has tended to focus on the orientalist gaze or the view from the imperial center. In this episode, Armen T. Marsoobian offers us the unique lens of the Dildilian family of Armenian photographers in provincial Anatolia. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Dildilians worked to memorialize portraits of fragmenting families and to document everyday scenes in provincial cities such as Sivas, Samsun, and Merzifon. Marsoobian, himself a descendant of the Dildilians, has woven together the family's remarkable photographic archive along with their memoirs and oral histories, to describe how  through ingenuity and professional connections, the family and with them much of their art survived the genocide in 1915-16. « Click for More »

with Lorenz Korn hosted by Emily Neumeier and Sotirios Dimitriadis Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The fountain standing in the Hippodrome (At Meydanı) in Istanbul, located just a few steps away from some of Turkey’s most famous tourist attractions like Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, doesn’t attract much notice these days. But wrapped up in this monument, gifted to the people of the city by the German Emperor Wilhelm II, is a story that sheds some light on the bilateral relations between the Ottoman Empire and their European neighbors before WWI. What is the role that the arts play in this diplomatic relationship? Under what conditions could such an object be inserted in the topography of Istanbul’s historic monuments? In this episode, Emily Neumeier and Sotirios Dimitriadis speak with Lorenz Korn about his research on the imperial fountain, tracing the process of its design, construction and reception. « Click for More »

with Paolo Girardelli hosted by Emily Neumeier Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In the classical Ottoman period, European embassies in Istanbul pretty much looked like any other residential building. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, a period of dramatic geo-political and social change, official foreign residences likewise underwent a process of transformation. Architectural designs shifted from Ottoman to Western styles, and these landmarks became increasingly prominent and visible in the urban landscape. In this episode, Emily Neumeier speaks with Paolo Girardelli about how Pera became the “district of diplomacy” in the Ottoman capital, the subject of his forthcoming book project, Landscapes of the Eastern Question: Architecture and Identity in Galata, Pera, and the Bosphorus, 1774-1919. « Click for More »