2115 Francis Scott Key
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
phone: 301-405-8403
fax: 301-314-9399
Email: mzilfi@umd.edu

          Madeline Zilfi specializes in Middle Eastern and Islamic history during the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire, including the transition to the modern states of the Middle East. Her written research focuses on the period from the 1680s to the 1830s, particularly with regard to urban culture and social and religious movements, law and legal practice, slavery and freedom, and women's experience.
      Professor Zilfi is the author of The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Post-Classical Age (1988) and editor of Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Middle East (1997).  She is also an associate editor of the six-volume work, Europe 1450-1789:  Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, ed. Jonathan Dewald (2003).  She has written on Islamic revivalist movements, divorce and family relationships in Islamic law and Ottoman-era practice, sumptuary regulation and patterns of consumption, cultural conflict in the early eighteenth-century Tulip Era, and slavery and domestic labor.  Her article, “The Kadizadelis:  Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul” (Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 1986), won the Turkish Studies Association’s award for best article in 1986-87. 
      Professor Zilfi has been the recipient of grants and awards from the National Humanities Center, the U.S. Fulbright Committee, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the University of Maryland General Research Board, and the Turkish Studies Association.  In addition to studies in England, Germany, and France, she has conducted research in Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and has traveled widely in the Middle East as well as Europe.  She is a member of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Turkish Studies Association, and the American Historical Association.  She has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES); Hawwa:  Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World; the Association of Central Asian Studies; and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS).  She also served as the editor of the Turkish Studies Association Bulletin/Journal (1992-1994).
      Her most recent book, Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire, a study of slavery, gender, and imperial ideology in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been published by Cambridge University Press (2010).
      Professor Zilfi’s courses include “History of the Ottoman Empire”; “Women and Society in the Middle East”; “Islam in Europe”; “Orientalist Visions and the History of the Middle East”; “The Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Middle East”; “Nationalism and Nation-Building in the Middle East”; and “Islamic Civilization.”  Her graduate courses include special topics courses on Ottoman-era politics, society, and gender issues as well as the “General Seminar in Middle East History” and “Social and Intellectual Movements in Early Modern and Modern Middle Eastern History.”  

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