4 March 2025 | 2:00-4:00pm on Zoom &
in Lecture Room 2, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Nazan Maksudyan (Centre Marc Bloch)
Body, Sound, and Disability: Deaf Culture and Education in the Ottoman Empire
The constant and conscious silence (non-speech) of the (deaf-)mute servants was considered as an important gift by the Ottoman political establishment as it ensured the perpetuation of sultan’s divine authority. The sign language developed within the Ottoman court for the use of deaf and non-deaf servants (as well as the royalty) was a fascinating communication method that impressed both the Ottoman subjects and European visitors. Interestingly, Ottoman Deaf education, which was slowly taking shape in the decades following the Milan Conference of 1880, was actually in a limbo. On the one hand, the well-established palace traditions of sign-language and lip-reading might easily be adapted into classroom techniques. The manual method, used in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Ottoman Deaf educators also suggested a subtle continuity from the palace school to ‘modern schooling’. However, global scientific and medical narratives on the subject had a consensus on the “incontestable superiority of articulation over signs” and the necessity of “sounding the deaf”. The oral method treated Deafness as a “linguistic disability”, such that the main objective of such training was to make sure that the Deaf can pass as hearing people through their speech. This line of thinking was also becoming hegemonic in the Ottoman context, as the discourse on Deafness solely rested on “making the mutes speak” (dilsizlerin söyletilmesi). In this terminology, the constellation between sound, hearing, silence, and body worked against the agency of the Deaf, as voice came to represent humanity.
Nazan Maksudyan is a visiting professor at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin and a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in the UKRI-funded ERC research project, “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1914”. She was a »Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe« (EUME) Fellow in 2009 – 2010 and an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) in 2010 – 2011 and in 2016 – 2018. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a professor of history in Istanbul and received her habilitation degree in 2015. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with special interest in children and youth, gender, sexuality, exile, sound, and the history of sciences. Among her publications are Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (2019), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (2014), Women and the City, Women in the City (ed., 2014), Urban Neighborhood Formations (ed. with Hilal Alkan, 2020).
Ottoman Auralities 