Assistant Professor

Biography

Duygu Yıldırım is a historian of science and medicine specialized in the early modern Mediterranean and in the Ottoman Empire. Broadly, her work focuses on cross-cultural interactions, translation, materiality, embodiment, critical historiography, and the relationship between knowledge-making and faith.

She is currently working on a book project which explores the role of religious conflict and the idea of human diversity in the making of natural and medicinal knowledge between the Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe. She is also the co-editor of a forthcoming book, Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023), which shows how natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins during the rise of modern life sciences.

Yıldırım received her PhD in History from Stanford University in 2021 with a dissertation entitled “The Age of the Perplexed: Translating Nature and Bodies between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1650-1730,” and it is internationally recognized with two honorable mentions: Santorio Award for Excellence in Research and Turriano Early Career Book Prize. Her research has been funded by the Dan David Prize Scholarship, Social Science Research Council, Renaissance Society of America, Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), and Stanford Humanities Center among others. Prior to joining the UTK, she was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.