Faculty of Music
Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1922
Applications are invited for two full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate positions offered to start in September 2023. The successful applicants will work on a collaborative project led by Dr Peter McMurray at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge.
The project offers the opportunity to conduct research into histories of sound and audiovisual media in the late Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean (1789-1922), focusing on how sonic practices and their mediations through technical systems produced important cultural shifts. Candidates should propose a research project within this broader framework that relates to their own research interests and expertise to pursue over the course of the position. Projects that foreground minority communities in Anatolia (e.g., Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians) as well as Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire (e.g., the Syrian Provinces) are particularly welcome.
The Project
This project explores histories of sound and audiovisual media in the late Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean (1789-1922), focusing on how sonic practices and their mediations through technical systems produced important new cultural shifts. Far from the standard narratives of the late empire's ‘decline’ or of unidirectional technological transfer from Europe, these histories show a wide range of responses and manifestations of embodied agency, from the government officials and religious institutions in Istanbul to individual shopkeepers and families far from the capital. Sound and related media simultaneously offer a more corporeal historiography of the region and possibilities for emphasizing the voices - both literal and figurative - of women, ethnic minorities and other communities that have figured less centrally in some histories. In turn, focusing on the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean allows a decentring of Europe and North America within sound and media studies.
A key component of the project will be an emphasis on sonic cartography, mapping both early audio recordings and textual documents related to sound and media, giving a clearer sense of the cultural and media topographies of this critical period in which telegraphy, audio recording, film, telephony and radio all emerged as key technologies that both shaped and were reconfigured through extant local cultural techniques such as poetry, religious recitation, domestic songs, and so on. The period in question, sometimes called "the longest century" in Ottoman history, begins with the reign of Sultan Selim III, an important composer/poet and political reformer, and ends with the founding of the Turkish Republic, a moment in which the politics of language, alphabets, music and religious sounds were all yet again called into question. As Turkey prepares to mark its own centenary, with increasingly nationalistic celebrations of the Ottoman past, this history is ever more timely today.
Possible Research Topics
Applicants may propose any project that has relevance to the broad remit of the project. Some areas of particular interest within the broad area of the late Ottoman Empire and eastern Mediterranean might include:
- sound/music and the history of Ottoman medicine
- D/deaf culture in the Ottoman Empire and beyond
- auditory cultures of marginalised communities (Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, Greeks, et al.) and of Arab provinces/regions
- sonic techniques of gender/sexuality
- urban sonic environments (especially beyond Istanbul)
- religious sonic arts (e.g., tajwīd, dhikr/semāʿ, cantillation) and silence
- sound as political/geographic contestation
- early sound recordings in the eastern Mediterranean
- other audio/visual media (e.g., telegraphy, photography) and their sonic implications
- material cultures of music (e.g., instruments/instrument-building, notation systems)
- intersections of poetry and auditory culture
- ecocriticism and sound
- philosophical explorations of sound and sensation
- timbre and/or noise
- the voice and vocal practices
- sound and warfare/violence (including the 1826 ‘Auspicious Incident’)
- sound as public/counterpublic practice
- sonic/sensory cartography
- acoustics and the science of sound (including biology, physics, etc) in the region
- law, legal reform and sound
- sonic aspects of architecture
Again, this list is meant to offer some possible areas of interest, not to provide a definitive framework. All applicants are welcome and encouraged to contact Peter McMurray with potential project ideas.
As a final note, while the project explicitly focuses on the Ottoman Empire and eastern Mediterranean, projects from neighbouring regions in close dialogue with these areas or with strong comparative elements will also be considered.
Details on the application process can be found on the University’s advert and Further Information sheet.
