Language, Desire and the Mobility of Ottoman Literary Culture, with Dr Selim Sırrı Kuru

In this first episode of a new Heritage Türkiye three-part miniseries, part of the Ottoman Mobilities and Interactions Project—a British Academy–funded initiative bringing together the network of British International Research Institutes—we speak with Dr Selim Sırrı Kuru. Dr Kuru, who also serves on the Advisory Board of the Ottoman Mobilities and Interactions project, is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington. Dr Kuru's research focuses on Ottoman and Anatolian Turkish literature from the Early Modern Period, in particular the formulation of gender and sexuality and exchange between Persian and Ottoman cultural contexts. In this conversation, he reflects on how the idea of mobility reshapes our understanding of Ottoman literary culture, not only through the movement of people, but through the circulation of languages, manuscripts, poetic forms and ideas. From the emergence of Western Anatolian Turkish as a written language to the travels of manuscripts and poetic traditions across Arabic, Persian and Turkish worlds, the episode reveals the Ottoman literary sphere as a richly interconnected and mobile cultural landscape.