Virginia H. Aksan

Research: My research interests include military history and trans-imperial intellectual encounters and the circulation of knowledge in the pre-modern Mediterranean and Eurasia. My research focus has largely been comparative war & society, especially Ottoman, Austrian & Russian, 18^th-mid-19^th centuries.  I have a special interest in the European obsession with the "Turk," then and now. Publications include a study of an Ottoman reformer: An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783, Brill, 1995; Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: an Empire Besieged, Pearson-Longman 2007, and with Daniel Goffman, a co-edited volume entitled The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, CUP 2007. The Ottomans 1700-1923:An Empire Besieged, a revised version of Ottoman Wars, was published by Routledge in 2022.

Sample articles: "Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context 1750-1850," in Erik Jan Zürcher. ed. Fighting for a Living, Amsterdam, 2013; “The Ottoman Absence from the Battlefields of the Seven Years War,” in Patrick J. Speelman and Mark J. Danley, eds. Seven Years War as a Global Conflict. Leiden, 2013; "Who was an Ottoman? Reflections on 'Wearing Hats' and 'Turning Turk,'" in Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, ed. Europe und die Türkei in 18. Jahrhundert / Europe and Turkey in the Eighteenth Century (Göttingen: 2011); “What’s Up in Ottoman Studies?” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1:1-2 (2014).

Chasing the Ottoman Early Modern https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsUHrQ7ONGA

Ottoman War and Peace: State of the Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEaNj_pP4sE

Ottoman War & Peace: Studies in Honor of Virginia H. Aksan, ed. by Frank Castiglione, Ethan L. Menchinger and Veysel Şimşek.  Brill, 2020