Carter V. Findley

Carter V. Findley is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the History Department at Ohio State University, where he teaches the history of Islamic civilization, with emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He also co-founded Ohio State’s world history program. His newest book, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, published by Yale University Press in 2010, won the Joseph Rothschild Prize of the Association for the Study of Nationalism, the Publication Award of the Ohio Academy of History, and Honorable Mention for the M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize of the Turkish Studies Association. His The Turks in World History, published by Oxford University Press (2005), won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize for Middle East Studies: The Al Mubarak Book Prize. His recent publications also include “An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gülnar, 1889,” in The American Historical Review, February 1998. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded him a fellowship for 2003–2004 to write his forthcoming Yale Press book. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded him a fellowship for 2004–2005 for his current study on “Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson and His Tableau général de l’Empire othoman,” the most important eighteenth-century European publication on the Ottoman Empire.

Carter Findley has published a series of two books on administrative reform and development in the late Ottoman Empire: Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 and Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (published by Princeton University Press in 1980 and 1989, respectively). The second book won both the Ohio Academy of History Book Award and the M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize of the Turkish Studies Association. Both books have been translated into Turkish. Carter Findley is also the coauthor, with John Rothney, of Twentieth-Century World (seventh revised edition, Wadsworth Cengage, 2010) and has published more than thirty scholarly articles in English, French, and Turkish. All his scholarly books have been published in Turkish translation, and The Turks in World History is also being translated into Chinese.

Carter Findley is an Honorary Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. He was the 2010 University Distinguished Lecturer and a recipient of the 2000 Distinguished Scholar Award from Ohio State University, was a visiting lecturer at Bilkent University (Ankara, December 1997), a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris, May 1994), and a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1981–1982). He is a past winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute of Turkish Studies, and the Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship programs of both the U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. Department of Education. He has served as President of both the World History Association (2000–2002) and the Turkish Studies Association (1990–1992). He received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Harvard.

Profile photograph by K Fitzsimons.