International Summer Academy organised by  the University of Münster,  the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences

The International Summer Academy Chagatai Manuscript Reading Course aims to provide an international group of participants with advanced knowledge of one of the central languages of the Islamic world—Chagatai—through the study of primary texts. Chagatai is not only one of the most important Turkic languages but also an essential source and literary language for studying the history of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Northwestern China. However, due to the disciplinary division of this area between  Slavic Studies, Sinology, Turkic, Islamic and Iranian Studies, Chagatai is rarely taught. 

The Summer Academy, organised jointly by Prof. Dr. Philip Bockholt (University of Münster) and Prof. Dr. Jeanine Dağyeli (University of Vienna/Austrian Academy of Sciences), seeks to fill this gap. Building upon international initiatives for beginners, it expands the offering to an advanced level and thus helps open up the massive and largely underexplored corpus of Chagatai for a future generation of researchers. 

Instructors and course overview

The five invited lecturers are Jeanine Dağyeli (Vienna), László Károly (Uppsala), Benedek Péri (Budapest),  Eric Schluessel (Oxford) and Marc Toutant (Paris). Being renowned specialists in their respective fields, they will introduce participants to a variety of literary genres and texts, including poetry, historiography, craft treatises, and medicine. 

Sessions will be held in the mornings (9.30–11.00, 11.30–13.00) and afternoons (14.30–16.30), a total of 25 hours. The morning sessions will consist of a lecture and a hands-on exercise led by one of the lecturers, a presentation of a selected genre as well as discussions of ongoing research based on primary materials, while the afternoon sessions will consist of presentations and discussions by two to three participants who will present their own material, related to the texts of that day, each chaired by the teacher of the day. 

When and where? 

The Summer Academy will take place at the University of Münsterfrom Monday, 29 June to Friday, 3 July 2026. The event will be on-site only, online attendance is not provided.

The Ottoman and Turkish Studies Graduate (OTUGRAD) Workshop started its journey in 2025 with the goal to foster a welcoming and productive space for young scholars in these fields. We now invite early-career scholars whose research engages with primary sources, reconsiders conventional frameworks, and contributes fresh perspectives to the scholarship of Ottoman and Turkish history to submit abstracts for the second OTUGRAD workshop. The event will be hosted by CEU’s Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies on June 1, 2026.

The workshop aims to provide participants with an opportunity to present their research, engage in critical discussion, receive constructive feedback, and connect with both emerging and leading scholars in the field.

We encourage submissions from graduate students at all stages of their research.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Global and transregional connections

Microhistories and everyday life

Manuscript studies and print cultures

Network studies and digital humanities

Diplomacy and borderlands

Material culture

New perspectives on Ottoman and Turkish historiography

Each presentation will be 15 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of discussion at the end of each panel. The workshop will be conducted in English.

Prospective applicants should submit an abstract (c. 250 words) along with their name, institutional affiliation, and contact details to cemsconference@ceu.edu by March 1st. Successful applicants will be notified by the first week of April. Should you have any queries, do not hesitate to reach out to us via the same email address.

We look forward to welcoming you to Vienna for an engaging exchange of ideas in Ottoman and Turkish Studies!

Organizing Committee: Ahmet Baran Demir, Göker Giresunlu, Elli Stogiannou

For more details: https://cems.ceu.edu/call-papers-ottoman-and-turkish-studies-graduate-workshop-2026

The Politics of Archives in Turkey and related Geographies

Deadline for applications: 9 April 2026

The Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey (CEST) is pleased to invite applications for the 2026 CEST Summer School, dedicated to the theme “The Politics of Archives in Turkey and related Geographies.” The summer school offers a unique week-long theoretical and practical training focused on archives that preserve, organize, and disseminate materials related to the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey.

Preserving, cataloguing, organizing, and granting—or restricting—access to documents, newspapers, and ephemera is a distinctly political matter. If archives are to be considered “not as sites of knowledge retrieval but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography”, as Ann Laura Stoler argued, this means that we must adopt a critical approach and view the archives themselves, as well as practices of (des-)archiving, as objects of study. In contemporary Turkey and beyond, struggles over archival access, classification, and digitisation are inseparable from broader debates on sovereignty, national history, identity claims, and the boundaries of permissible knowledge. Decisions about access and classification are exercises of institutional sovereignty that shape which histories can be written and which remain marginalised.

In recent years, new collections have emerged or been opened, yet at the same time some archives or collections have been closed to the public. Meanwhile, numerous NGOs and private actors have engaged in alternative archiving practices. Besides, the possibilities offered by the digitalization of documents have made thousands of items accessible even from a distance, to the point of creating an overabundance of some sources (to the detriment of other collections). How does the availability of online documents shape knowledge and research? What are the limits and advantages of building multimedia and transnational platforms for the preservation of digital documents? How do cataloguing practices and archival organization, shaped by heritage policies, hinder research on minority or marginal subjects, or on otherwise sensitive topics?

Beyond textual sources, archives also structure access to visual and oral history sources: what do these sources tell us, and how can we move beyond the immediacy and the fascination of aesthetically appealing materials?

The Summer School takes these questions as starting points to interrogate both the materiality and the politics of archiving across different institutional and cultural settings.

Click here for more information on how to apply.