A. Tunç Şen

A. Tunç Şen is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of the Ottoman world from its beginnings in the fourteenth century through the early twentieth century, focusing on the history of sciences and divination, manuscript culture, the history of emotions, and the social history of scholarship. His forthcoming first book, based on his award-winning dissertation and tentatively titled Forgotten Experts: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600, will examine what “scientific authority” and “expertise” meant in the early modern context. His publications include “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bayezid II (r. 886/1481-918/1512) and his Celestial Interests,” “Practicing Astral Magic in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul,” and “The Emotional Universe of Insecure Scholars in the Early Modern Ottoman Hierarchy of Learning.” He is a member of an international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition (GHOST): Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities, funded by the European Research Council. He regularly teaches courses on Ottoman-Turkish history, the history of the occult in the Muslim world, and Islamicate manuscript culture.

Tunç Şen serves as an Advisory Committee Member.