U.C. Davis History Department - Faculty

Baki Tezcan
Assistant Professor

E: btezcan@ucdavis.edu
T: 530-752-9981
O: 3222 SSH

Academic Biography

Tezcan got his B.A. in International Relations from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey (1994), and his M.A. and a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University (1996, 2001). He is completing his book manuscript entitled The Second Empire: The transformation of the Ottoman polity in the early modern period, which offers a new conceptual framework to study Ottoman political history from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

His next project is called Contesting the Frenk: Western Europeans in Early Modern Ottoman Eyes, which is going to be a short book on Ottoman appropriations of the western European figure in the late sixteenth century Ottoman historical and geographical literature.

Tezcan is planning to publish a critical edition of Hüseyin Tûghî’s chronicles on the regicide of Osman II (1622). He is also collecting materials for a project tentatively entitled Shades of Black: Perceptions and self-perceptions of Africans in the pre-modern Islamic World, and another one on the Mongol role in early Ottoman history and its denial in the early republican Turkish historiography.

Research Interests

Mainly pre-modern Middle Eastern history, focusing on such topics as Ottoman political history in the 16th-18th centuries; pre-modern ethnic and racial identities in the Islamic world; Ottoman perceptions of others; Ottoman and modern Turkish historiography; fiscal and monetary history; Islamic law, and the intellectual tradition of Islam.

Selected Publications

Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A volume of essays in honor of Norman Itzkowitz, co-edited with Karl Barbir, forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Center for Turkish Studies in the fall of 2007.

“The Politics of Early Modern Ottoman Historiography,” in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, eds., Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 167-98.

“Dispelling the Darkness: The politics of ‘race’ in the early seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in the light of the life and work of Mullah Ali,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (2007): 73-95.

“Le développement de l’usage du terme ‘Kurdistan’ comme description géographique et l’intégration de cette région dans l’Empire Ottoman au XVIe siècle,” tr., Boris James, forthcoming in Études kurdes [translation of “The development of the use of ‘Kurdistan’ as a geographical description and the incorporation of this region into the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century,” in The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation, ed., Kemal Çiçek et al., 4 vols. (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), vol. 3, pp. 540-53].

“The Frenk in Different Ottoman Eyes of 1583,” in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye (1453-1750): Visual Imagery before Orientalism, ed., James Harper, forthcoming from the Ashgate Press.

Courses Taught

Introduction to the Middle East; World History, c. 1350-1850; Middle Eastern History III: The Ottomans, 1401-1730; Undergraduate Proseminar on Holy War in Comparative Perspective; Honors Thesis advising on such topics as the Armenian Genocide; Graduate seminars on race in pre-modern Islamic world; Graduate reading courses on late medieval and early modern Middle Eastern history; undergraduate courses on Islam and the Qur’an (in Religious Studies Program) and on Middle East and South Asia (in the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program).