TLRH | The Alhambra: A View from the East

Tuesday, 13 April 2021, 4 – 5pm A talk by Prof Edhem Eldem (Collège
de France) as part of the School of Languages, Literatures and
Cultural Studies Research Seminar Series in association with
Trinity Long Room Hub. All webinars take place at 4pm. Presenters
speak for a maximum of 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A. From
Chateaubriand to Owen Jones, and from Washington Irving to
Jean-Léon Gérôme, travellers, poets, artists, novelists, and
architects have greatly contributed to the rediscovery of the
Alhambra in the 19th century, thus feeding into the development of
modern tourism, romanticism, medievalism, and, perhaps most of all,
orientalism. The predominance of this Western phenomenon has masked
the fact that the monument was also visited by increasing numbers
of “Orientals,” from Moroccan envoys to Ottoman diplomats, and from
Maronite pilgrims to Arab and Turkish intellectuals. Tens of such
visitors can be tracked down through the signatures and comments
they left in the Alhambra’s visitor’s book, kept since 1829. Thanks
to this unique source, combined with the personal writings of some
prominent visitors and reports published in the local press, one
can reconstitute the fascinating story of an alternative discovery,
that of the Alhambra by the alleged heirs of the civilization it
represented. Edhem Eldem is a professor at the Department of
History of Boğaziçi University and holds the International Chair of
Turkish and Ottoman History at the Collège de France. He has also
taught at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, EHESS, EPHE, ENS, and was a
fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His fields of interest
include the Levant trade, funerary epigraphy, Istanbul, the Ottoman
Bank, archaeology and photography in the Ottoman lands, Ottoman
first-person narratives, Westernization, and orientalism. Selected
publications: French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century
(1999); A History of the Ottoman Bank (1999); The Ottoman City
between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (1999, with D.
Goffman and B. Masters); Pride and Privilege. A History of Ottoman
Orders, Medals and Decorations (2004); Consuming the Orient (2007);
Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire
(2011, with Zainab Bahrani and Zeynep Çelik); Camera Ottomana.
Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire (2015, with Zeynep
Çelik); L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident (2018).
His latest work on the subject, L’Alhambra, à la croisée des
histoires, is scheduled for publication at les Belles Lettres,
Paris, in May, 2021. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/