Historian Giancarlo Casale, an expert on the history of the Ottoman Empire, will present Carleton College’s Fall Herbert P. Lefler Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. in Leighton Hall, Room 305. Entitled “What Did It Mean to Be European in the Sixteenth Century? A View from the Ottoman Empire,” Casale’s lecture is free and open to the public.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the major powers in Europe and the Middle East from the 14th Century until its collapse at the end of the First World War. From its capital in Turkey, the Ottomans controlled a vast territory extending from the Balkans to Arabia to North Africa, and were notable both for their considerable military strength and their advanced arts and technology.
Casale, who holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, is a professor at the University of Minnesota and serves as the Executive Editor of the Journal of Early Modern History. He is the author of The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2010), a book that explores Ottoman naval expansion in the Indian Ocean during the 16th Century, a period in which the Ottomans were vigorously competing with the Portuguese empire that represented the main European presence in the Indian Ocean. Situating the Ottoman Empire in the context of the Age of Discovery, Casales’s important book forces us to rethink many of our beliefs about early modern history.
The Herbert P. Lefler Lecture Series in History is presented annually at Carleton College with the aim of bringing to the campus historians who have raised significant questions relevant to history as a whole. Lefler lecturers give public presentations on their latest research, and conduct a seminar session with history majors regarding major conceptual issues. Past lectures have ranged across a wide variety of topics, from “The Birth of Feudalism” to “Nationalist Movements in Southern Africa” to “Nuclear Weapons in American Thought and Culture.” Lecturers also meet with students enrolled in the junior year history colloquium, a class designed to examine the fundamental questions on the nature and importance of the discipline of history.
This event is sponsored by the History Department. For further information and disability accommodations, contact nlambert@carleton.edu or call (507) 222-4232. Leighton Hall is located at the end of College Street on the Carleton campus.