Zeynep Ecem Pulas

Doktorandin Postanschrift: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Historisches Seminar Lehrstuhl für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte Westeuropas 79085 Freiburg im Breisgau E-Mail: ecempulas@gmail.com

Academic Career
Grants and Awards
Ph.D. Project
Research
Conferences, Workshops and Presentations
Professional Experience
Research Languages

Academic Career

Grants and Awards

Ph.D. Project

Synchronizing the Empire: Technological Infrastructures and Imperial Imaginaries in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1855-1914

This research explores how the Ottomans’ use of modern technology, namely, telegraph and railway, paved the way to new forms of collective thinking about the past and imagining the future of the Empire. Whereas railways created physical unification of the Empire, the telegraph created temporal unification. Beyond its practical use, however, technology had also an imaginative use. These technologies became vehicles through which social actors articulated their expectations, grievances as well as hopes for the future. These imaginations were reflective of the Empire's anxieties in keeping pace with Europe and the shifting global economic and political order. By situating railway and telegraph networks within the wider scope of turn of the century imperialism and capitalism, as well as within the discourse of “civilization” and “progress” I hope to find answers of the following questions:

How did Ottomans understand and utilize modern technologies — namely telegraph and railway, and to what extent their understandings were subjected to class hierarchies? How did these technologies become part of new ways of thinking—about past, present and future and the Ottoman society at large? How do the Ottoman transport and communication networks relate to the global technological change in the nineteenth-century?

This project contributes to the burgeoning field of the social history of telegraph and railway in the Ottoman Empire. It foregrounds the Ottoman agency and decision making in technology in use. Moreover, by operationalizing the term socitechnological imaginary which is “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures...attainable through technology.” this project unravels the ways in which Ottoman actors used these technologies to envision a future for the Empire, for society and attain their collective social goals. By doing so, it treats modern technology as an integral part of the history of late Ottoman modernization, rather than as an independent force that affects the society.

Research

Conferences, Workshops and Presentations

Professional Experience

Research Languages

• Turkish (native)
• English (Proficient)
• German (Advanced)
• French (Intermediate)
• Ottoman Turkish (Upper intermediate)