E354 | Dragomans are often known as diplomatic translators, but their responsibilities and roles went much further than being mere interpreters. In this podcast, we speak with Natalie Rothman about how dragomans negotiated both linguistic space and social space across the Eastern Mediterranean. Focusing specifically on the case of Venetian dragomans, we discuss their training and how they managed to become brokers of knowledge and connections between the Ottoman Empire and myriad publics in Venice and beyond. In the second half of the podcast, we delve a bit deeper and examine how dragomans came to contribute to the budding world of Orientalist knowledge among seventeenth-century European scholars.
See more at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/03/dragomans.html
E. Natalie Rothman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she researches and teaches early modern Mediterranean history, Venetian-Ottoman diplomatic mediation, the relationship between translation and empire, the history of archives, and digital scholarship. Rothman is is a member of the inaugural cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of a multiple-award winning book, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011). She is currently completing her second monograph, entitled The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism.
Nir Shafir is a historian whose research explores the intellectual and religious history of the early modern Middle East, with a focus on material culture and the history of science and technology. He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is an assistant professor of history at UCSD.
Aslihan Gürbüzel is assistant professor of Ottoman History at McGill University. She specializes in Ottoman Sufism in the early modern period and in manuscript studies.
CREDITS
Episode No. 354
Release Date: 2 April 2018
Recording Location: Toronto, Ontario
Audio editing by Nir Shafir
Music: Gavur İmam İsyanı courtesy of Bandista
Images and bibliography courtesy of Natalie Rothman, available at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/03/dragomans.html
