Susanna Ferguson | Smith College (original) (raw)

Published Articles by Susanna Ferguson

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2023

Protestant missionaries in Beirut published two astronomy textbooks in Arabic. While male student... more Protestant missionaries in Beirut published two astronomy textbooks in Arabic. While male students at the Syrian Protestant College studied Cornelius Van Dyck's Foundations of Astronomy, girls at secondary schools-the highest level of female education-studied Eliza Everett's Principles of Astronomy: For Use in Schools. These texts appeared at the height of a cross-cultural encounter between American Protestants and the inhabitants of Beirut and Mount Lebanon that added new meanings to the Arabic concept of science (ʿilm). Historians have analyzed men's discussions to chart how ʿilm, once a broad category akin to "knowledge" in English, came to include a neo-Baconian understanding of the modern English "science." This article turns to science pedagogy, a field that included both men and women, to argue that the conceptual transformation of ʿilm also entailed an epistemological division along lines of gender and age. Overall, the story reveals how a study of women in science sheds light on the gendered history of science in Arabic.

Modern Intellectual History, 2022

This article frames the history of anticolonialism in the Arab world as a history of gender, sex,... more This article frames the history of anticolonialism in the Arab world as a history of gender, sex, and power. By thinking with early twentieth-century Arab intellectuals, it revises the assumption that the heterosexual body enters into politics primarily as a site of regulation and control. Europeans justified colonialism in the Arab East by arguing that Arabs were like children who needed tutelage before self-rule. Arab writers contested these temporal assumptions through their own theories of human development. Some figured childrearing as a form of temporal engineering through which Arab women would control human and civilizational growth. Others, like cosmopolitan Arab nationalist Fuʾad Sarruf, advocated an anticolonial nationalism that tied the temporality of rupture and event to the sexual development of the male body. These responses by Arab intellectuals to assumptions of colonial belatedness show how the biological body entered anticolonial politics as an active agent of pol...

From the early modern era to the contemporary context, the history of sexuality has been immanent... more From the early modern era to the contemporary context, the history of sexuality has been immanent to the history of empires, occupations, reforms, and revolutions in the Middle East. Emphasizing continuities and ruptures in the region’s political and social history, this article outlines the historiography of sexuality in the Middle East across early modern empires and modern colonial/postcolonial nation-states. Writing histories of sexuality and colonialism in the Middle East across a long period requires tracing transformations in categories of body, gender, and sex, on the one hand; and law, family, power, and colonialism on the other hand. The scholarship we elaborate in this article tackles the possibilities, limitations, and historical transformations of these categories. It also demonstrates possible areas of intersection and commonality with other regional histories of sexuality and empire.

Arab Studies Journal, 2018

Nineteenth-century Arabic speakers used two key concepts to refer to education: schooling, or ta‘... more Nineteenth-century Arabic speakers used two key concepts to refer to education: schooling, or ta‘lim, and upbringing, or tarbiya.1 While today many see these two terms as synonymous, the history of their relationship sheds light on a defining characteristic of nineteenth-century education in the Arab world and beyond: education’s promise to both transform the individual and contain social upheaval. This capacity to promise both transformation and stability made education important to reformers and statesmen around the nineteenth-century world. From France to Russia to Iran, education figured centrally in visions of state formation, individual progress, and social change.2 In Arabic, however, the dyad of ta‘lim/tarbiya marked the tension between reform and stability particularly clearly. While in previous centuries higher education had largely trained clerical, military, scholarly, or administrative elites while religious institutions handled the primary levels, in the nineteenth cen...

Arab Studies Journal, 2018

This article examines the emergence and material effects of a new concept of education based arou... more This article examines the emergence and material effects of a new concept of education based around the dyad of upbringing (tarbiya) and education (taʿlīm) that emerged in Arabic in the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on Ottoman Beirut and Mount Lebanon, it shows how this Janus-faced concept inspired a faith in the promises of education from above and from below. From above, those with access to capital saw investments in education as a way to stabilize a threatened socio-political status quo and promote their visions of social order. Meanwhile, students and parents of all social backgrounds hoped that the transfer of new skills and knowledges advertised by modern schools could open new pathways to social mobility. The double-edged conceptual architecture of "education," encapsulated by the dyad of tarbiya/taʿlīm, is one reason education became a matter of such broad interest, substantial investment, and ideological power.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2015

This article reads a 2009–11 debate over the proposed reissue of Syria's Personal Status Code in ... more This article reads a 2009–11 debate over the proposed reissue of Syria's Personal Status Code in the Syrian feminist journal al-Thara to highlight the role women's rights discourse plays in disciplining and producing political subjects. Ferguson draws on Talal Asad's observation that “languages of justice do not simply justify political acts, they help to shape political actors.” In the case of al-Thara, Ferguson argues, “women's rights” functions as one such language of justice, helping shape the political subjectivities of those who speak in its name. She shows how invocations of women's rights help fashion subjects who share a faith in modernity and progress and an aversion to tradition, a distancing from what is deemed religious in favor of what is considered secular, and a confidence in the promises of the nation, the universal, and the international. This debate also demonstrates how invocations of women's rights are inflected by the history and political specificities of the contexts in which they are deployed. The article asks how formulating arguments around women's rights serves to influence and delimit political claims and possible alliances.

Book Reviews by Susanna Ferguson

Arab Studies Journal, 2018

Journal of Arabic Literature, 2014

Journal of Arabic Literature 45 (�0�4) �65-�94 Book Reviews Journal of Arabic Literature 45 (�0�4... more Journal of Arabic Literature 45 (�0�4) �65-�94 Book Reviews Journal of Arabic Literature 45 (�0�4) �65-�94

Papers by Susanna Ferguson

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2016

Since the publication in 1986 of Zeynep Çelik’s seminal book The Remaking of Istanbul, the histor... more Since the publication in 1986 of Zeynep Çelik’s seminal book The Remaking of Istanbul, the history of nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture has emerged as a viable and growing field of study. Buildings once broadly dismissed as products of the Ottoman Empire’s decline and overreliance on Western models have finally been reexamined in their proper context by such scholars as Turgut Saner, Alyson Wharton, and, in particular, Ahmet Ersoy, whose new study (and first monograph) is the long-awaited fruit of his superb doctoral dissertation. Ersoy’s subject is the shift in Ottoman architectural culture that occurred in the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–76), when the Tanzimat—a comprehensive programme of Westernising reforms initiated in 1839—entered its latter phase. It was in this political context that Ottoman architects, who had been working in a style tied to European Neoclassicism, moved to an eclectic historicist mode in which traditional Ottoman motifs were combined with Orientalist and even Gothic elements. Much denigrated in twentieth-century scholarship, this new style is reappraised by Ersoy in the light of its written manifesto, the Usul-i Mi‘mari-i ‘Osmani (‘The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture’, henceforth the Usul), a lavishly illustrated trilingual treatise published in Istanbul for the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna. The Usul aimed not only to present Ottoman architecture as a rational system worthy of comparison with its European counterparts, but also to describe the tradition’s development as a cyclical narrative in which the monuments of Abdülaziz’s period—with their ostensible return to Islamic principles—heralded an Ottoman Renaissance. Through close analysis of this text in relation to the buildings themselves and to broader historical and artistic contexts, Ersoy dispels the view that the architecture’s patent relationship to contemporary European Orientalism is evidence of uncritical and self-exoticising acceptance of Western fantasies. He seeks instead to demonstrate ‘how Orientalism was embraced by its very objects, the self-styled “Orientals” of the modern world, as a marker of authenticity and as a strategically located aesthetic tool to project universally recognizable images of cultural difference’ (p. 4). This ambitious reassessment is divided into four chapters that form two complementary pairs, as Ersoy explains in his excellent introduction. Chapter 1 establishes a global context for Ersoy’s study by examining the Ottomans’ participation in the Vienna World Exhibition, a locus of international competition with multiple stakeholders. Challenging traditional East-West binaries, Ersoy presents Austria itself as a troubled imperial power attempting to win the admiration of its Western neighbours, an aim shared by the Ottomans in their ‘quest for affirmation and recognition in Europe’ (p. 88). The Usul was one of a series of exhibitory products by which the Ottomans consciously represented

"Tracing Tarbiya" is a feminist conceptual history of education and upbringing as they ... more "Tracing Tarbiya" is a feminist conceptual history of education and upbringing as they were articulated by intellectuals writing in Arabic between the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and the outbreak of the second World War. It focuses on women writers raised in the educational crucible of Beirut and Mount Lebanon who moved to Cairo and Alexandria around 1900 to become theorists of tarbiya, an old Arabic word for cultivation and upbringing that came in the nineteenth century to refer to new structures of formal schooling, new pedagogies, and the feminized labor of childrearing, moral cultivation, and subject formation in the home. Through the work of these writers and others, the concept of tarbiya moved across gender, geography, and sect to enable new political imaginaries: upbringing became the way to shape men and women fit for representative politics, to produce an Arab world capable of facing rising European power, and to refashion Muslim, Christian, and European intellectual traditions for a new age. "Tracing Tarbiya" makes three main arguments. First, while scholars have highlighted the ongoing importance of affective and embodied practices of subject cultivation within the Islamic tradition, this story shows how new pedagogies based around affect and embodiment captivated both Christians and Muslims between 1860 and 1939. Second, this work traces the ongoing power of discourses about motherhood and childrearing to show how writers in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria came to identify tarbiya as the foundation of successful reform, making women, children, and the family into a primary site for political argument and action. Finally, "Tracing Tarbiya" puts gendered discourses about upbringing at the center of the history of representative governance in the Arab world, proposing that a non-Western political concept might help us to better understand the disjuncture between the promises of representative democracy and its actual outcomes in Egypt, Lebanon, and beyond. By adopting conceptual history meth [...]

The pairing of women’s history and the study of gender produces an inherent tension: while women’... more The pairing of women’s history and the study of gender produces an inherent tension: while women’s history assumes the coherence of categories like “man” and “woman,” ascribing particular historical experiences to women and to men, studying gender means analyzing and interrogating the very categories on which women’s history is based. What did it mean, historically, to be a “man” or a “woman,” and what other gender categories might have been equally important in shaping social life? How did ideas about sex, biology, desire, gender roles, and the family change over time? Below, you’ll find groups of episodes which ask both questions about the historical experiences of women and about the historical construction of gender categories and norms.

(please see link for remainder of this introduction to the series "Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World)

Ottoman History Podcast by Susanna Ferguson

Ottoman History Podcast | E 342 In this episode, we discuss the history of Beyoğlu's Emek Cinema... more Ottoman History Podcast | E 342
In this episode, we discuss the history of Beyoğlu's Emek Cinema from its construction in 1884 to its 2013 destruction, which sparked major opposition among Turkish intellectuals, writers, researchers, members of the film industry, and lovers of cinema and of Beyoğlu, many of whom fought to keep this piece of Istanbul's cultural and architectural heritage. Through a wide-ranging discussion with architects and historians, this episode shows how the history of one building can speak to trajectories of urban development, violence, and transformation in Istanbul from Ottoman times until today.

What did Istanbul's Spice Bazaar smell like in Ottoman times? In this episode, we explore the his... more What did Istanbul's Spice Bazaar smell like in Ottoman times? In this episode, we explore the historical smellscape of this iconic market space from its early history up to the present day. Through a story about Ottoman smells and their transformations in the twentieth century, we touch on the trade routes of exotic spices, Ottoman marketing practices, and the greener, more fragrant Istanbul that still lives in the memories of twentieth-century shopowners who spent their lives in and around the Bazaar. Finally, we consider how telling history through smell could change the way we think about the past and struggle to preserve it

In this episode, we explore debates about aesthetics, headwear, and dress in interwar Algeria and... more In this episode, we explore debates about aesthetics, headwear, and dress in interwar Algeria and Turkey. Why did hats and hijabs generate so much debate among Algerian thinkers, both men and women? How did expectations about what men would wear on their heads carry different political connotations than similar debates about women's head coverings? This episode takes up the role of dress and comportment in shaping Algerian conversations about colonialism, feminism, and Islamic reform, as well as the importance of a "Turkish model" in interwar Algerian debates.

In this episode, we explore the life and times of Roxelana, also known as Hürrem Sultan, a slave ... more In this episode, we explore the life and times of Roxelana, also known as Hürrem Sultan, a slave girl who became chief consort and then legal wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (r. 1520-1566). We trace Roxelana's probable beginnings and the possible paths that took her to Istanbul, asking how she rose above her peers in the Old Palace to become a favored concubine and then the wife of the Sultan. We explore her relationship to other women at the Ottoman court, the politics of her motherhood and philanthropy, and her role in Ottoman diplomacy. In the end, Roxelana's work, her relationship with Suleiman, and the unusual nuclear family they created despite the otherwise polygynous patterns of reproduction at the Ottoman court would transform the rules of Ottoman succession, the role of Ottoman royal women, and the future of the Empire as a whole. The life story of this one remarkable woman sheds light on many facets of the history of the Ottoman Empire, showing how a single individual's story can serve as a lynchpin for grasping the complexities of an age.

In this episode, Ellen Fleischmann and Christine Lindner discuss the history of women and gender ... more In this episode, Ellen Fleischmann and Christine Lindner discuss the history of women and gender and the American Protestant Mission in Lebanon. How did American missionary women experience and transform the American Protestant project in the Levant in the 19th and 20th centuries? How did American missionaries, both women and men, interact with women from Beirut and Mt. Lebanon, both those who converted and those who did not? And how did these heterogeneous interactions produce new experiences of womanhood, family, power, and authority in the Levant? Drs. Fleischmann and Lindner reflect on these questions based on their considerable research in Lebanon and elsewhere, and also share their thoughts about sources and strategies for tracing women's history and missionary history in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Levant.

A tale of mutual ignorance between psychoanalysis and Islam has obscured the many creative and co... more A tale of mutual ignorance between psychoanalysis and Islam has obscured the many creative and co-constitutive encounters between these two traditions of thought, both so prominent in the 20th century. This presumed incommensurability has hardened the lines between the "modern subject," assumed to be secular and Western, and its Others, often associated with Islam or with the East. In this episode on her forthcoming book, The Arabic Freud, Dr. Omnia El Shakry asks what it might mean to think psychoanalysis and Islam together as a "creative encounter of ethical engagement." She shows how psychoanalysts and thinkers in Egypt after World War II drew on Freud and Horney alongside Ibn 'Arabi and Abu Bakr al-Razi to explore the nature of the modern subject, the role of the unconscious, and the gendered process of ethical attunement. In so doing, she suggests that Arabic psychoanalytic texts were neither epiphenomenal to politics nor simply political allegory for nationalism or decolonization; rather, we have ethical and historiographical responsibilities to read these texts and others like them as something more than a product of their time.

In this episode, we uncover histories of feminist writing and activism in the Modern Middle East,... more In this episode, we uncover histories of feminist writing and activism in the Modern Middle East, asking how women's textual production and activism changed over the twentieth century and looking at new directions in research on the history of women and feminism in the region. In the first half of the episode, Marilyn Booth introduces us to feminist writer and biographer Zeinab Fawwaz, who transformed women's writing in 1890s Egypt. We show how central questions of gender, marriage, and girls' education were to discussions about society and nation after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and through the first decades of the twentieth century. In the second half of the episode, Nova Robinson discusses her research on Nour Hammada, a women's activist from interwar Lebanon who argued for an "Eastern" or "Arab" women's rights framework. At the end, we come together to think about the new avenues of inquiry shaping Middle East history and the history of women and gender in the region.

The epithet "abid," Arabic for "slave," still follows those with dark skin as they move around to... more The epithet "abid," Arabic for "slave," still follows those with dark skin as they move around today's Cairo. The word and its negative connotations, however, have a long history. In this episode, Professor Eve Troutt Powell explores this history by tracing the many lives of slaves and slavery in late Ottoman Egypt. She draws on the narratives of Ottoman Egyptian elites, Sudanese slave traders, and slaves themselves to show how the practice of owning people with dark skin shaped a regional Ottoman-Egyptian-Sudanese economy, gendered patterns of elite household life, and prominent forms of textual and visual culture. She reads representations of slavery and slaves' lives in the late nineteenth century to show how practices of Egyptian and Sudanese slave trading and owning, developed far from the decks of Atlantic slavers, nevertheless produced their own forms of racist thinking that have persisted into the present in Egypt as elsewhere.

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2023

Modern Intellectual History, 2022

Arab Studies Journal, 2018

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2015

Arab Studies Journal, 2018

Journal of Arabic Literature, 2014

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2016

(please see link for remainder of this introduction to the series "Women, Gender, and Sex in the Ottoman World)

With political and economic developments in 19th century Egypt, the lives of women began to chang... more With political and economic developments in 19th century Egypt, the lives of women began to change in dramatic ways. From the rise of wage labor and the restructuring of rural households to the emergence of women's movements and publications, pre-colonial Egypt witnessed numerous transformation in the realm of gender. In this episode, Liat Kozma shares her research regarding some of the most marginalized women in Egyptian society during this period of change. Manumitted slaves, doctors and midwives, factory employees, and sex workers were some groups of women who left many historical traces in the police, court, and medical records of the Khedival government.

In this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, Beth Baron discusses the historical context of the Mu... more In this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, Beth Baron discusses the historical context of the Muslim Brotherhood's rise during the interwar period and how the organization's activities and goals were shaped by the actions of European missionaries in Egypt.

In the 1920s and 1930s, politicians, intellectuals, and members of the public joined a lively deb... more In the 1920s and 1930s, politicians, intellectuals, and members of the public joined a lively debate about the issue of female suicide in Turkey. While we cannot know whether the rates of female suicide were actually skyrocketing during this period, the fact that so many public figures began to treat this issue as a central concern tells us a lot about the relationship between the modernizing state of Early Republican Turkey and the women whom it governed. In this episode, Nazan Maksudyan explores what might have provoked this debate, what it might say about the state and its relationship to women, gender, and the female body, and how women themselves might have used suicide as a means of asserting their agency.

In this episode, we consider the story of the Tanzimat reforms from the perspective of rural Capp... more In this episode, we consider the story of the Tanzimat reforms from the perspective of rural Cappadocia, a region in central Anatolia now famous as a tourist destination. In the nineteenth century, Cappadocia was home not only to the Muslim subjects who made up the majority of Anatolia's population but to a large population of Orthodox Christians as well. How did these communities experience the Tanzimat period and how did their relationships to each other and to the state change between 1839 and the demise of the Ottoman Empire?

The body of water now known as the Red Sea lay well within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire's wel... more The body of water now known as the Red Sea lay well within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire's well-protected domains for nearly four centuries. It wasn't until the 19th century, however, that this body of water began to be called or conceived of as "the Red Sea" by either Ottomans or Europeans. In this episode, Professor Alexis Wick argues that we have much to learn about how history (and Ottoman history in particular) "makes its object" by studying not only the emergence of the concept of the Red Sea, Ottoman or otherwise, but also the surprising absence of such a history in previous scholarship. His new book The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space (University of California Press, 2016) is both a conceptual history of the Red Sea as seen through both Ottoman and European eyes, and a reflection on the methodologies, tropes, and preoccupations of Ottoman history writ large.

In this episode, Christine Philliou traces the story of Istanbul's Phanariots, a group of wealthy... more In this episode, Christine Philliou traces the story of Istanbul's Phanariots, a group of wealthy, "Greek-identified" families who rose to play a central role in Ottoman foreign policy and diplomacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. What happened to these families in the tumultuous years preceding and following Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832? In this episode, we explore the biography of Phanariot Stephanos Vogorides and ask what his story has to offer Ottoman history. His story and that of the Phanariots shed light on Ottoman governance and diplomacy, as well as relations between Muslims, Christians, Ottomans, and Greeks in the important but often-overlooked moment just prior to the 19th century reforms known as the Tanzimat.

During World War I, the Lazarist college at Antoura, in the mountains of Mt. Lebanon north of Bei... more During World War I, the Lazarist college at Antoura, in the mountains of Mt. Lebanon north of Beirut, was taken over by Cemal Pasha to be used as an orphanage for Armenian and Kurdish orphans. Turkish feminist Halide Edib recounts in her memoirs that the time she spent as director of the orphanage during the war was among the happiest periods of her life. In this episode, Professor Selim Deringil discusses his new project, a film about the Antoura orphanage and its orphans during the war, painting a very different picture from that which emerges from Edip's memoirs. The film, entitled "After This Day," is produced and directed by Nigol Bezjian.

Since its foundation in 1928 by Boghos Nubar, son of Egyptian Prime Minister and Ottoman dignitar... more Since its foundation in 1928 by Boghos Nubar, son of Egyptian Prime Minister and Ottoman dignitary Nubar Pasha, the Nubarian library in Paris has served as a major resource for Armenian intellectual life and historical research in the diaspora. What is less well-known is how the library's rich holdings in Ottoman Turkish, Armeno-Turkish, French and English as well as in Armenian might be useful for historians of the larger Ottoman world. In this episode, we talk with library director Boris Ajemian about the extensive archival, photographic, and periodical collections available at the Nubarian library, new directions and possibilities for Armenian and Ottoman social and cultural history, and the library's own fascinating past.

In this episode, we talk with Marc Aymes about his approach to Ottoman provincial history through... more In this episode, we talk with Marc Aymes about his approach to Ottoman provincial history through the history of 19th century Cyprus. What is the difference between an Ottoman "provincial history" and "a history of the Ottoman provinces?" Can a "provincial" approach to Ottoman history change the way we understand major questions in Ottoman historiography, including the impact of 19th century reforms (Tanzimat), the role of Europe and Europeans in Ottoman society, and the relationship between Istanbul and other parts of the Sultan's well-protected domains? How might research on Ottoman Cyprus enable us to rethink not only established hypotheses about Ottoman governance, social life, and political transformation in the 19th century, but also our very modes of doing and understanding history itself?

What happens when we encounter "Orientalist" aesthetics outside the West? In the late nineteenth ... more What happens when we encounter "Orientalist" aesthetics outside the West? In the late nineteenth century, a cosmopolitan group of Ottoman architects turned to modern forms of art history writing to argue that synthesis and change stood at the heart of a particularly "Ottoman" architectural aesthetic. Working together, these writers produced the first text of modern art history writing in the Ottoman empire, the Usul-ı Mi’marî-yi Osmanî or The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture. This volume was published simultaneously in Ottoman Turkish, French and German for the Universal Exposition or World's Fair in Vienna in 1873. In this episode, Ahmet Ersoy explores the making of this text, its arguments, and its implications for understanding the relationship of the late-Tanzimat Ottoman Empire with Europe, its own cosmopolitan "hyphenated-Ottoman" intellectuals, and historical imagination.

Did the Ottoman Empire "decline" after an initial golden age of rapid expansion and military conq... more Did the Ottoman Empire "decline" after an initial golden age of rapid expansion and military conquest? This question has long haunted the telling of Ottoman history. Critics note that describing centuries of Ottoman history simply as "decline" makes it seem inevitable that the Empire would be defeated in World War I, emptying the story of the contingency and nuance it deserves. How else might we describe the nature of political, economic, and cultural change in the later centuries of the Ottoman Empire? What other questions could we ask? In this episode, Baki Tezcan describes the period he calls the "Second Ottoman Empire," between roughly 1580 and 1826, not as a period of decline but as one of political transformation. His story radically remakes existing narratives about the nature and history of Ottoman political authority and governance and offers an important alternative to the "decline thesis" that has haunted Ottoman history for so long.