Theme and topics of the Conference

Ottoman women’s press – as women’s press in international literature – has primarily been approached as a field of construction and reconstruction of women's collective identities; as a forum for debating the "women's question" and undertaking public interventions; as a place of advancing writing and welcoming female literary works, and – to a lesser extent – as a space of communication and power network development, negotiation of new (bourgeois) life models, and inter-communal communication. Women’s press as a business enterprise, and women as editors of and/or contributors to publications have attracted little research attention so far. 

The majority of studies on the aforementioned fields/topics explore women’s publishing activity separately, within the confines of each Ottoman religious community. Additionally, the bulk of the research results has been published in the national languages of the modern nation-states that emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Both historiography traditions place significant restraints on the promotion of research and an overall,“holistic” approach to the historical phenomenon under discussion.

The Conference therefore seeks to bring together researchers in the field and serve as a forum for academic communication and addressing related issues: to present the results of the research so far, to identify convergences and divergences in the emergence and evolution of women’s publishing activity and the women’s press, to highlight research gaps, discontinuities, constraints, and limitations in research, and to present new theoretical approaches and research questions in the field.

Topics of interest for the Conference include, but not limited to:

• Women’s publishing endeavors in Ottoman Empire
• Print cultures - Entrepreneurship
• Women editors: Geography of life and activity - Professional transitions
• Women’s press: Writing - Reading - Readership
• Women’s press - Gender identities - Gendered social ideologies - Emancipation - Anti-emancipation - Feminism(s)
• Women's publications - Public space & Discourses - Power & Social control
• Women’s press - Cultural transferring - Morals and Bourgeois models of life
• Women’s press and Politics: Nation - Gender - Empire
• Illustrations in the press
• Women’s press in the Ottoman and European-Western world