Ottoman shopkeepers, religious officials, and women far from Istanbul used sound—poetry, song, telegraphy, and early recordings—to shape their own cultural and political lives, not simply to receive technology from Europe. This project challenges the standard narrative of a declining Ottoman Empire passively adopting Western media. Instead, it shows that communities across the Eastern Mediterranean actively adapted new sonic technologies—telegraphy, audio recording, film, telephony, radio—to their existing practices of religious recitation, domestic song, and poetry. The research fills a gap by recovering the literal and figurative voices of women, ethnic minorities, and ordinary people who are often absent from histories focused on elites and European influence. If successful, the project will produce a sonic cartography—maps of early audio recordings and textual documents—that reveal the cultural and media topographies of the late Ottoman period (1789–1922). This is primarily fundamental historical research. It does not aim to change infrastructure or technology today. However, by decentering Europe and North America within sound and media studies, it could reshape how scholars and the public understand the global history of communication, offering a more inclusive, embodied account of how media power operated outside the West.
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This project explores histories of sound and audiovisual media in the late Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean (1789-1922), focusing on how sonic practices and their mediations through technical systems produced important new cultural shifts. Far from the standard narratives of the late empire's "decline" or of unidirectional technological transfer from Europe, these histories show a wide range of responses and manifestations of embodied agency, from the government officials and religious institutions in Istanbul to individual shopkeepers and families far from the capital. Sound and related media simultaneously offer a more corporeal historiography of the region and possibilities for emphasizing the voices - both literal and figurative - of women, ethnic minorities and other communities that have figured less centrally in some histories. In turn, focusing on the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Mediterranean allows a decentering of Europe and North America within sound and media studies. A key component of the project will be an emphasis on sonic cartography, mapping both early audio recordings and textual documents related to sound and media, giving a clearer sense of the cultural and media topographies of this critical period in which telegraphy, audio recording, film, telephony and radio all emerged as key technologies that both shaped and were reconfigured through extant local cultural techniques such as poetry, religious recitation, domestic songs, and so on. The period in question, sometimes called "the longest century" in Ottoman history, begins with the reign of Sultan Selim III, an important composer/poet and political reformer, and ends with the founding of the Turkish Republic, a moment in which the politics of language, alphabets, music and religious sounds were all yet again called into question. As Turkey prepares to mark its own centenary, with increasingly nationalistic celebrations of the Ottoman past, this history is ever more timely today.
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