Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

Cosmopolitanism on the ‘Fields of Dead’:  Infrastructure, Spatial Change and Expert Knowledge in the Making of Pera, 1857-1880

This dissertation is a microhistory of the making of one of the most famous cosmopolitan enclaves within the Ottoman Empire, the late nineteenth-century Pera, focusing on the links between material infrastructure and urban culture. It aims at mapping (1) the networks of financial and political influence in the shaping of transportation infrastructure; (2) the transformation of the urban spaces tied to the change in infrastructure; (3) the intellectual landscape of expertise behind this process. The digital mapping will integrate the diachronic change of the spaces of Pera between 1857 and 1880, to the working of the synchronic networks of power and economic influence in the making of those spaces.