Scholarship and Biography
Amy Singer (Ph.D. Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, 1989) holds the Hassenfeld Chair in Islamic Studies and is Professor in the Department of History, and professor emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. She has been a visiting fellow at All Souls College (Oxford), a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and a senior residential fellow at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (Istanbul). She has also been a visiting professor at History Dept. of Bosphorus University (Istanbul) and a visiting Directeur d'Etudes in the Centre d'histoire du domaine turc at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). From 2018-2020, she was president of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.
Her research began with an in-depth study of the relations between Ottoman officials and Palestinian peasants, in an effort to move Ottoman agrarian history beyond cataloging the demographics and agricultural production of villages, published as Palestinian peasants and Ottoman officials (Cambridge, 1994). This first study revealed the importance of the Haseki Sultan waqf, a large, endowed public kitchen (imaret) founded in mid-sixteenth-century Jerusalem by the wife of Sultan Suleyman. This led to a second monograph, published as Constructing Ottoman Beneficence (Albany, 2002). One endowment led to others, and to broader questions about benevolent giving, which resulted in the monograph Charity in Islamic Societies (Cambridge, 2008). Each monograph has also appeared in Turkish translation.
Singer’s research now focuses on the Ottoman city of Edirne (Byzantine Adrianople) in the half century before the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The key questions here are: What was an Ottoman capital in these years, and how did the capital experiences constitute forms and practices that enabled the Ottomans to establish Constantinople as the Ottoman capital of Istanbul?
Under development is a recently launched project on "Ottoman Diasporas in New England." Scholars and the communities themselves have explored the separate heritages of the communities that constitute this diaspora -- Albanians, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Lebanese, Syrians, and Turks. However, little attention has been given to the connections among these immigrants through their shared experiences as former Ottoman subjects arriving in the U.S. between c. 1870 and 1924. These are the focus of this new project.
For an up-to-date CV, please visit https://brandeis.academia.edu/AmySinger.