The limited information we have about women and gender in the early modern period is almost always related by men through gendered discourses and only a few women are registered in biographical dictionaries. Among them, Mihri Hatun (d. circa 1512) was the first Ottoman woman whose poetry was collected during her lifetime and is still intact in four manuscript copies. The way she is registered in intellectual history vis-à-vis her own writing reveal not only her story in the male-dominated intellectual circles but also the performative nature of the intellectual world. Didem Havlioglu will discuss Mihri’s unapologetically marginal voice as a way to understand the physical and discursive contours of the Ottoman intellectual world.
 

Didem Havlioglu is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Asian and Middle Studies at Duke University and the author of Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-bending and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse, 2017) Her work is in the intersection of literature and history with a focus on gender and sexuality. She has published on and about women both in the early modern and modern Ottoman world. She is particularly interested in women’s ways of reconstructing themselves through writing and how they challenge and regenerate discursive practices in history.