Daria Kovaleva (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Oral Drama in Istanbul and the Production of Public Culture in the Second Ottoman Empire (1570s-1820s)

Karagöz puppet, reproduced in Felix von Luschan, “Das türkische Schattenspiel,” in Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie 2 (1889): 81.

Daria Kovaleva is a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation investigates the performers of oral drama and the production of spectacle in Istanbul between the late sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The history of the imperial capital’s storytellers, comic impersonators, shadow puppeteers, their evolving dramatic practice and emerging repertoire serve as a window to explore how public culture was produced at that time in the major urban centers of the Eastern Mediterranean (Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul) in comparison to Venice and Naples. The chronological frame of the project allows to revise what remains of pre-nineteenth-century dramatic texts and the evidence which sheds light on its performers, while placing their investigation within the public sphere of early modern Istanbul and within the historical context of the Second Ottoman Empire (1580-1826), as conceptualized by Baki Tezcan (2010). To approach the elusive performative arts historically, the project combines methods of book history and manuscript studies with a history of concepts, historical semantics and socio-economic history (study of profession, industry and market). This research will demonstrate how the Ottoman Empire was not unlike its early modern contemporaries when it comes to the politics, economy, and sociology of the production of culture in general, and the production of spectacle in particular.