SHIFA-ANA Project

📣Deadline Extended | Call for Papers SHIFA-ANA Workshop II| “Histories of Death and Disease in the Mediterranean World”, June 15-16, 2026 9 ANAMED, Istanbul.

April 16, 2026 (Thursday) 11:00-12.30 EDT 17:00-18.30 CET 18:00-19:30 Istanbul (GMT+3) 💻Online (Zoom) 🔗 To join, please log in to the CHSTM working group page and access the Zoom link at the time of the meeting. We look forward to seeing you online!✨

The talk explores how concerns over contamination reshaped nineteenth-century Istanbul, focusing on food, water, and sewage as interconnected domains of urban life, and how the idea of a "hygienic city" emerged through uneven and contested processes.

We're pleased to invite you to the seventh meeting of the SHIFA-ANA Working Group this academic year. In this session, Dr. Can Gümüş will present: “Dirt, Disease, and the Making of Urban Hygiene in Late Ottoman Istanbul.”

📢 CFP Reminder: Street and Field: Hygiene, Disease, and Death Across Spaces and Ages 📍 Kadir Has University, Istanbul 📅 19 June 2026 ⏳ Deadline to send abstracts: 12 April

Call for Papers: International Süheyl Ünver Symposium The International Süheyl Ünver Symposium, which will explore the life, oeuvre, and legacy of Ahmet Süheyl Ünver through an interdisciplinary lens, will take place on December 10–12, 2026, hosted by İstanbul Medipol University. An inquisitive physician, a foundational historian of medicine, a versatile artist, an influential educator, and the preeminent cultural historian and scholar-artist of his era, Ünver produced a remarkably rich and varied corpus that defies disciplinary boundaries and conventional categories. His defter collections—meticulous field notebooks that integrate drawings, ornament studies, tombstone recordings, topographical notes, craft analyses, and textual excerpts—embody a methodology that combines scholarly rigor with the attentive eye of an artist and the exploratory sensibility of a traveler. Taken together, they form one of the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary personal archives produced in the Middle East in the twentieth century, and they continue to serve as an invaluable resource for scholars, artists, and researchers across a wide array of fields. Ünver’s legacy invites us to rethink how we examine cities, manuscripts, artifacts, medicine, and cultural heritage, and to explore how these interconnected fields of knowledge can be carried into the future. In this context, we invite paper proposals for the symposium to be held in İstanbul. 📅 Application Deadline: April 15, 2026 For detailed information and submissions: suheylunver.medipol.edu.tr/en

📌 m.youtube.com/watch?v=w6yVOj…

Nükhet Varlık’ın Direnen Akademi dersleri kapsamında Sevgi Soysal Kütüphanesi’nde verdiği “Pandemileri Yeniden Düşünmek: Osmanlı’da Küresel Tarihe Yeni Perspektifler” dersinin video kaydını Direnen Akademi’nin YouTube hesabından izleyebilirsiniz.

Berrak Burçak, daha önceki çalışmalarında da olduğu gibi, geç Osmanlı’da kadın güzelliğinin artık sadece estetik bir mesele olarak değil, tıp, hijyen, fizyoloji ve toplumsal görev diliyle kurulduğunu ancak bunun tamamen daha erken tartışmalardan bir kopuş da olmadığını söyledi. Konuya oldukça dengeli yaklaşan, keyifli bir sunumdu. Eski humoral temelli anlayıştan, modern fizyoloji temelli bir anlayışa geçişi de vurguladı. Kadının bedeninin evin sağlığı, toplumun terbiyesi, nüfusun geleceği, imparatorluğun canlılığı ile irtibatlı bir alan olmasında yeni olan ve zaten eski olanın ne olduğu üzerine daha çok konuşulması gerekiyor. Nasihat, norm, uzmanlık ve öz denetim üzerinden işleyen ağlar sonuçta yeni şeyler değil ama yeni kıyafetleri ve dilleri de var.

Today’s the day! Join us for the lecture ✨

Together with @betul_atasoy In collaboration with @shifaanaproject we aim to challenge the conventional rural-urban divide by blending streets and fields through the lenses of hygiene, disease, and death.

Abstracts (300 words) due: April 12, 2026 📌For further inquiries, contact: streetfieldkhas@gmail.com 📍Form: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

We are looking forward to seeing papers from a wide range of disciplines -but not limited to- history, architecture, urban studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and the medical humanities.✨

Street and Field: Hygiene, Disease, and Death Across Spaces and Ages International Symposium 19 June 2026 📍Kadir Has University, Istanbul

🗓️ January 15, 2026 (Thursday) 🕒 11:00–12:30 EDT | 5:00–6:30 CET | 7:00–8:30 GMT+3 💻 Online (Zoom) We look forward to seeing you online!

We’re pleased to invite you to the sixth SHIFA-ANA Lecture this academic year! In this session, Prof. Berrak Burçak Della Fave (Bilkent University) will be presenting a paper titled “Healthy Beauty: The Medicalization of Aesthetic Norms in the Late Ottoman Empire”.

📣Deadline Extended | Call for Papers SHIFA-ANA Workshop II| “Histories of Death and Disease in the Mediterranean World”, June 15-16, 2026 9 ANAMED, Istanbul.

✏️Full call & submission details: link in bio docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI… Still polishing your abstract? This is your sign. We look forward to your contributions

We welcome proposals from history, archaeology, anthropology, medical humanities, human-animal studies, and related fields, especially those using interdisciplinary, comparative, or connected approaches. Abstracts (300 words) due: March 15, 2026