History Department

Education

• Ph.D., Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 2001
• M.A., Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 1996
• B.S., International Relations, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, 1994

About

Baki Tezcan joined the UC Davis History Department in 2002 (for the first 13 years of his career at UC Davis, he was a faculty member in Religious Studies as well). He was one of the founders of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program (ME/SA), which he directed from 2012 to 2015. In addition to History and Religious Studies, he also taught for ME/SA and Medieval and Early Modern Studies programs, and led the "Last Empire of Islam" Summer Abroad Program in Istanbul in 2007, 2009, and 2011 (for photographs from these summers, see the Facebook group "Baki's Bottle," named after the water bottle Tezcan held up while leading his students in tourist crowds).

Research Focus

Mainly pre-modern Middle Eastern history, focusing on such topics as the transformation of Islam in the Ottoman public sphere from the late thirteenth to the early twentieth century; 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 with a special emphasis on the relationship between politics, on the one hand, and philosophy and science, on the other.

Representative Publications

• The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010 (paperback, 2012).
• “The Memory of the Mongols in Early Ottoman Historiography.” In Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future, edited by Hakkı Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı, pp. 23-38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
• “Law in China or Conquest in the Americas: Competing Constructions of Political Space in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.” Journal of World History 24 (2013): 107-34.
• “Dispelling the Darkness of the Halberdier’s Treatise: A Comparative Look at Black Africans in Ottoman Letters in the Early Modern Period.” In Disliking Others: Alterophobia in Pre-Modern Ottoman Lands, edited by Helga Anetshofer, Erdem Çıpa, and Hakan Karateke, pp. 43-74. Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2018.
• "A Populist Reformation: The Early Modern Transformation of Islam in the Ottoman Empire." In Empires and Gods: The Role of Religions in Imperial History, edited by Jörg Rüpke, Michal Biran, and Yuri Pines, pp. 295-319. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.
• "Secularist Anxieties Meet Evangelical Ones in Modern Turkish Historiography: İbrahim Müteferrika and the Risale-i İslamiye." In Transforming Empire: The Ottomans from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean: Essays in Honor of Linda Darling, edited by Serpil Atamaz, Onur İnal, and Alexander Schweig, pp. 45-69. Leiden: Brill, 2024.

For a list of Tezcan's publications that includes the articles he published in the last five years as well as all the volumes he co-edited, see Tezcan's faculty page in the Graduate Program in the Study of Religion; for older articles, see his Academia page.

Teaching

Introduction to the Middle East; US in the Middle East; World History, c. 1350-1850; Middle Eastern History III: The Ottomans, 1401-1730; undergraduate proseminars on topics such as Holy War in Comparative Perspective and modern Turkey; undergraduate reading courses on such topics as American Muslim women and male sexuality in the pre-modern Islamic world; honors thesis advising on such topics as the Armenian Genocide and British Imperialism in Arabia; graduate seminars on historiography, race in pre-modern Islamic world, and early modern Ottoman history; graduate reading courses on late medieval and early modern Middle Eastern history; undergraduate courses on Islam, the Qur’an, Islamic law, politics and religion, and pilgrimage (in Religious Studies Program) on Middle East and South Asia (in the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program), and on late medieval and early modern history of Europe (in the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program); and advanced modern and Ottoman Turkish reading courses for graduate students in diverse departments.

Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2018-19
• Sabbatical grant from the Institute of Turkish Studies, TÜBİTAK fellow at Istanbul Şehir University, 2011-12
• Society for the Humanities fellow at Cornell University in 2005–06
• UC Davis Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, 2005
• American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) postdoctoral fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 2001-02