Skip to Content

Staff Accolade

Posted On February 01, 2013 | 10:53 am | by noahm | Permalink

Yota Batsaki, Executive Director of Dumbarton Oaks, co-edited (with Sahar Bazzaz and Dimiter Angelov) a volume of essays on Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, just published from the Center of Hellenic Studies/Harvard University Press. While drawing on recent methodological and theoretical directions in the study of empire, the volume shifts our attention from the Atlantic to the eastern Mediterranean, a space shaped by two empires of remarkable duration and territorial extent, the Byzantine and the Ottoman. Through texts as diverse as court records and chancery manuals, imperial treatises and fictional works, travel literature and theatrical adaptations, the essays span the medieval to the modern periods and explore ways in which the production of geographical knowledge supported imperial authority or revealed its precarious mastery of geography.