Dr. Peter McMurray | Website | OrcID | pm638@cam.ac.uk
Peter McMurray is associate professor of music at University of Cambridge and the Principal Investigator for “Ottoman Auralities.” His work focuses on auditory cultures in Turkey and its diasporas (especially in Berlin) as well as the Ottoman Empire and southeastern Europe. He is completing a book/media project, Pathways to God: The Islamic Acoustics of Turkish Berlin, and he has co-edited two books: Singers and Tales in the 21st Century (with David F. Elmer, 2024), focusing on the study of oral poetry today, and Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Media, and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, 2024). In the Ottoman Auralities project, his work focuses on Sufism, oral poetry and voice, and communications technologies.
Dr. Nazan Maksudyan | Website | OrcID | maksudyan@cmb.hu-berlin.de
Nazan Maksudyan is a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) in the ERC project, ‘Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1914’ (PI: Peter McMurray) and a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. 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 and migration, sound studies, and the history of sciences. She is an Editorial Board Member of Journal of Women’s History, Journal of European Studies, and First World War Studies. Her major publications include Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (Syracuse UP, 2019), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse UP, 2014), Women and the City, Women in the City (ed., Berghahn, 2014), and Urban Neighborhood Formations (ed. with Hilal Alkan, Routledge, 2020).
Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz | Website | OrcID | vpde2@cam.ac.uk
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz is currently a Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge and Research Associate at the Faculty of Music. A former Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow, Senior Fulbright Research Fellow, TALIM Fellow, Posen Fellow and Broome and Allen Fellow of the American Sephardi Federation, she founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive in 2012. Currently on the Board of the Jewish Music Institute in London and Chair of the Mediterranean Music Study Group of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, Dr. Elbaz’ academic publications focus on issues of voice, diplomacy, migration, gender and minorities across the trans-Gibraltar region and its Mediterranean and American diasporas. She completed her PhD at the Center for Mediterranean and Middle East Studies of the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations (INALCO) of the Sorbonne, and her MM at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Dr. Onur Engin | Website | OrcID | oe239@cam.ac.uk
Onur Engin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge and a member of Cambridge Digital Humanities. He is working on an ERC Starting Grant funded by UKRI, titled “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media, and Power, 1789-1914.” He earned his PhD in Art History from Koç University in Istanbul. His book project, Echoes over the Bosphorus: An Auditory History of Late Ottoman Istanbul (1826-1923), focuses on three sound-producing devices—church bells, cannons, and talking machines—as organizing principles to examine the city’s modernization from the perspectives of sound, hearing, and listening. He also employs computational methodologies, such as digital cartography, textual analysis, and network theory, to investigate Ottoman discographies and concepts of noise in the Ottoman Empire.
Dr. Jacob Olley | Website | Academia | jo448@cam.ac.uk
Jacob Olley is a Research Associate on the ERC/UKRI project Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1922 at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Music at Cambridge, and Research Associate on the DFG project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Mansucripts at the University of Münster. His publications include a two-volume critical edition of an early nineteenth-century manuscript collection of Ottoman music and the co-edited volume Rhythmic Cycles and Structures in the Art Music of the Middle East (2017). His article “Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court” (2023) won the American Musicological Society Alfred Einstein Award, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Early Career Prize, and an honourable mention for the Royal Musical Association Jerome Roche Prize. He is currently working on a monograph titled Transcribing Empire: Musical Literacies and the Armenian Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Istanbul.
Hande Betül Ünal | ghbu2@cam.ac.uk
Hande Betül Ünal is a PhD student in Music at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research focuses on the auditory culture and sonic experiences of Ottoman writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, examining the types of sounds prevalent in the Ottoman Empire and how they were perceived, documented, and interpreted across a range of texts. Prior to her PhD, she earned a BA in History from Şehir University and an MA from Sabancı University, where her thesis explored the musical culture in and around the Ottoman court during the reign of Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754).
Ottoman Auralities 