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 East history in the period of the Ottoman Empire.  Her research interests focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly with regard to Ottoman-Islamic urban culture and social movements, Islamic law and legal practice, and women's experience.  She 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 was previously editor of the Turkish Studies Association Bulletin and has written on Islamic revivalism, early modern divorce and consumption patterns, the Tulip Era, and slavery.  Her book, Women and Slavery in the Ottoman Middle East, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  (For a complete list of her scholarly works, consult her vita.)
          Professor Zilfi has been the recipient of grants and awards from Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the University of Maryland Graduate Research Board, the Institute of Turkish Studies, and the Turkish Studies Association.  In 2005-2006, she was a fellow of the National Humanities Center.  She serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Hawwa:  Journal of the Middle East and the Islamic World, and The Journal of Central Asian Studies.
          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 Modern Middle East,” and “The Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” as well as special topics graduate seminars.  

Return to Faculty Listing

Current Projects