black/ white headshot of Aleksandar Shopov
Alumni

Aleksandar Shopov

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (Jun 2022-Aug 2022)

Dr.

Aleksandar Shopov is a historian with interests in economic and environmental histories of the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. His research and activism have focused on the history of and present-day debates about urban agriculture, especially in Istanbul. He received his MA from Sabanci University in Istanbul in 2007 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2016. His dissertation explored connections between Early Modern farming manuscripts in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, the rise of agrarian capitalism, and environmental change in the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. He previously held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Library in Washington DC, the Research Center for Anatolian Civilization in Istanbul, the Center for Mamluk Studies in Bonn and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Aleksandar was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG between 2019–2021 and returned in summer 2022 as a visiting scholar.

Current Projects

No current projects were found for this scholar.

Completed Projects

Plants, Trade, and Knowledge
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Water, Agriculture, and Science
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Selected Publications

Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). “‘Fezzan is the Siberia of Africa’: Desert and Society in the Prison Memoir of Pavel Shatev (1882–1951), an Anarchist from Ottoman Macedonia.” Global Environment 12 (1): 237–253. https://doi.org/10.3197/ge.2019.120110.

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Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). “‘Books on Agriculture (al-filāha) Pertaining to Medical Science’ and Ottoman Agricultural Science and Practice around 1500.” In Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. G. Necipoğlu, C. Kafadar, and C. H. Fleischer, 557–568. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004402508_017.

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Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). “Cities of Rice: Risiculture and Environmental Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Balkans.” Levant 51 (2): 169–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/00758914.2020.1807127.

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Shopov, Aleksandar (2020). “The Vernacularization of Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Agricultural Science in its Economic Context.” In Living with Nature and Things: Contributions to a New Social History of the Middle Islamic Periods, ed. B. J. Walker, 639–681. Göttingen: V&R unipress.

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Past Events

Workshop

Animal Mobilities Authors Workshop

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Conference

Towards a Global History of Soil: Sciences, Practices, Materialities and Mobilities, 1100-1700

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Lecture

Mapping Soil Types in a Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cadastral Survey

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Lecture

Soil and Farming Implements in Medieval and Early Modern Egypt

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Primary Source Reading Group

Agriculture and the Making of Sciences

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Primary Source Reading Group

Agriculture and the Making of Sciences

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Colloquium

A Green-Colored Leaf Called Tabaġa: Early Ottoman Inquiries into an American Plant

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Nachrichten & Presse

Akademischer Verlag Brill veröffentlicht neue Open-Access-Reihe mit Unterstützung des MPIWG

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