Caleb Shelburne is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science at Harvard University. His dissertation, "Knowing Ottomans: Nineteenth-Century Social Sciences in and about the Ottoman Empire" explores social scientific knowledge production about the Ottoman Empire, bringing together Ottoman scholars and their non-Ottoman interlocutors to study the emergence, spread, and ramifications of fields like anthropology, history, and sociology. Drawing on methods and scholarship from the history of social science, the history of knowledge transfer, Ottoman history, and other related fields, it shows how the scientific study of an "Ottoman" identity - or its absence - laid the foundations for modern understandings of the Middle East. Shelburne is also conducting research on the trade of medicinal leeches in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, a project that builds on his interest in non-Western knowledge production but also brings in themes and methods from the histories of medicine, commerce, and the environment.
This information is accurate for the time period that the student is affiliated with CES.
