Veysel Şimşek

Veysel served as a postdoctoral research fellow and interim codirector of IOWC in 2015–16, and subsequently held a Chauncey Postdoctoral Fellowship in Grand Strategy with Yale’s International Security Studies in 2016–18. He is currently the lecturer in Turkish at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University.

Veysel completed his doctorate in Ottoman history at McMaster University under the direction of Dr. Virginia H. Aksan in 2015. His first book project, “Remaking the Ottoman Empire, 1789–1856: Imperial Ideology, Military Power, and the Politics of Islam,” focuses on the intersections of modern state formation, war-making, and the interplay between state policies and different interpretations of Islam. Beyond the history of the Ottoman Empire, his broader academic interests include subjects such as governance, identity, war and society, transnational exchange, and memory.

He has participated in the research at Indian Ocean World Centre since 2013. As a research affiliate of IOWC, Veysel has worked on the competition in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa between the Sublime Porte, Khedival Egypt, and the British Empire over control of communication and trade routes between Asia and Europe in the 19^th century. He also contributes to the ongoing digital humanities projects, including IOWC’s database for environmental events, visualization and geo-mapping of the historical data related to the Indian Ocean World.

Peer Reviewed Publications

Books

(with Frank Castiglioni and Ethan Menchinger) eds. Ottoman War and Peace: A Festschrift for Virginia H. Aksan (Leiden: Brill, 2019): xxvi+448

(with Virginia H. Aksan) eds. “Living Empire: Ottoman Identities in Transition, 1700–1850.” Special issue. The Journal of Ottoman Studies, no. 44 (2014): 1–501

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Under Fire and Lice: Experiences of an Ottoman Soldier in World War I and the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922).” In Ottoman War and Peace: A Festschrift for Virginia H. Aksan, eds. Frank Castiglioni, Ethan Menchinger and Veysel Simsek (Leiden: Brill, 2019): 143-156

“‘Backstabbing Arabs’ and ‘Shirking Kurds’: History, Nationalism, and Turkish Memory of World War I.” In The Great War: From Memory to History, eds. Jonathan Vance et al. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015: 99–126

“The First ‘Little Mehmeds’: Conscripts for the Ottoman Army, 1826–53.” The Journal of Ottoman Studies, no. 44 (2014): 265–311

“Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Düzenli Ordu için Asker Toplanması: 1826–1853” [Recruitment for the Regular Army in the Ottoman Empire: 1826–1853]. Toplumsal Tarih [Social History, Istanbul], no. 198 (2010): 36–42

Transcription of selected early nineteenth–century Ottoman constitutional texts. In 1815–1847, vol. 2 of Quellen zur Europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert [Handbook of European Constitutional History in the Nineteenth Century]. Bonn: J. H. W Dietz Nachfolger, 2010. CD–ROM