EUME
2014/ 2015

Ufuk Adak

Ottoman Prison Reform in Izmir and Salonica in the late Ottoman Empire

Ufuk Adak has just submitted his PhD thesis in History to the University of Cincinnati in 2014. He also holds a BA and MA in History from Ege University in Izmir. His dissertation examines the modalities of the social and political transformations of the major port cities, Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonica, in the Eastern Mediterranean world by focusing on crimes, punishment, social control, and prisons in the late Ottoman Empire. Adak presented several papers on prisons and prisoners in the late Ottoman Empire in various venues including the Great Lakes Ottomanist Workshop (GLOW) in Montréal and in Cincinnati, the Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT) in Chicago, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in Washington D.C., and the Fourth World Congress for Middle East Studies (WOCMES) in Ankara.


 

Ottoman Prison Reform in Izmir and Salonica in the Late Ottoman Empire

As a postdoc Fellow of Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Adak will continue and expand upon his research on Ottoman prisons and prisoners and prepare a book manuscript based on his dissertation. He will use the opportunity of the fellowship to refine his analytical strategies to incorporate transnational and comparative aspects of Ottoman prison reform. He will also try to re-think the idea of social control and surveillance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the ways in which the Ottoman government dealt with prisons as modern legal institutions, their personnel, and prisoners, and how prisoners developed in that context as captives of the state.