Jamie Pelling

Princeton University, Department of Near Eastern Studies

2023 Winner (Humanities)

"Feeling Like a State: Anxiety and Optimism in the Late-Ottoman Empire" 

What does it feel like to live in an empire that is ending? Drawing effectively on affect theory and specifically Laurent Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, Jamie Pelling’s dissertation explores the anxiety and optimism of the last years of the Ottoman Empire in an exceptionally compelling fashion. With a creative use of eclectic sources and archives, and well-executed argument, Pelling delivers and connects theoretically sophisticated case studies of the Hijaz railway project, the Society for National Contribution to the Ottoman Navy, the Ottoman morality police, and the erotic journal Bin Bir Buse in early republican Istanbul. Pelling’s critical analysis introduces new terrain and presents an original argument that productively opens new ways of approaching a topic on which so much has already been written.

The dissertation was completed at Princeton University in in Near Eastern Studies under the co-supervision of  Michael A. Reynolds and Julia Elyachar.

Return to List