Imagining & Narrating Plague in the Ottoman WorldA conversation with Orhan Pamuk and Nükhet Varlık

This event is sponsored by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, The Columbia University School of the Arts, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and The Department of History.

“Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk and award-winning plague historian Nükhet Varlık will have a conversation with historian A. Tunç Şen about how a novelist and a historian can imagine and recount past plagues. Pamuk and Varlık will share insights drawn from Ottoman plague episodes and discuss the challenges of relating these experiences in historical and fictional writing.

Orhan Pamuk is currently finishing his latest novel, Veba Geceleri, set on a plague-infested Ottoman island at the turn of the twentieth century. He is the Robert Yik-Fon Tam Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

Nükhet Varlık is the author of multiple award-winning Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600. She is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark.

A. Tunç Şen is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and an Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

Join us for a discussion and Q&A with the writers.

Register for the event here.