Fighting under the same banner

Richard Wittmann (Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard  University 2008) is the Acting Director of the Orient-Institut Istanbul, a German humanities research institute abroad.

His research interests focus on Islamic legal history and the social history of the Ottoman Empire. Special attention is given in his work to the consideration of life narratives as historic sources for the study of the Near East. Richard Wittmann coordinates an international collaborative research project aiming at the study and publication of Ottoman life narratives (www.istanbulmemories.org). He is the editor of the publication series Memoria. Fontes Minores ad Historiam Imperii Ottomanici Pertinentes (www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/memoria) and (co)editor of the monograph series Life Narratives of the Ottoman Realm: Individual and Empire in the Near East 

(https://www.routledge.com/Life-Narratives-of-the-Ottoman-Realm-Individual-and-Empire-in-the-Near-East/book-series/LNOR).

His latest coedited volume Istanbul-Kushta-Constantinople. Narratives of Identity in the Ottoman Capital, 1830-1930 was published with Routledge in 2019; „Cabinetmaking for the Sultan. Nineteenth-century Istanbul in the life narratives of German-speaking journeymen”, in: Ali Yaycıoğlu, Ilham Makdisi & Rachel Goshgarian (Hrsg.): Festschrift for Cemal Kafadar. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021, forthcoming.

Yaşar Tolga Cora is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2016 and he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Armenian Studies program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2016-2017. His research is on the social and economic history of the late Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on Armenian communities in Anatolia, and life narratives of Ottoman Armenians. Among his other publications are Harbiyeli Bir Osmanlı Ermenisi: Mülâzım-ı Sânî Kalusd Sürmenyan’ın Birinci Dünya Savaşı ve Tehcir Anıları (2015) and (co-edited with D. Derderian and A. Sipahi) The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics (2016).