Asst. Prof. Michael Douglas Sheridan

Biography

Asst. Prof. Michael D. Sheridan received his B.A. degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he concentrated on 20th-century French and Irish literature; his M.A. degree in English Literature from Boğaziçi University, where his thesis, “‘The Brain—is wider than the Sky—’: Nature and the Sublime American Self in Emerson and Whitman,” applied an aesthetic and ecocritical reading to 19th-century American poetry; and his Ph.D. degree in History from Bilkent University, with his dissertation entitled “‘I curse no one without cause’: Identity, Power, Rivalry, and Invective in the Early 17th-century Ottoman Court” being the first full-length study of the Ottoman literary mode of invective (hicv) and how it reflected and reinforced contemporary tensions and polarizations among the Ottoman sociocultural elite.

He has published a book, Ottoman Explorations of the Nile: Evliya Çelebi’s ‘Matchless Pearl These Reports of the Nile’ Map and His Accounts of the Nile and the Horn of Africa in The Book of Travels (with Robert Dankoff and Nuran Tezcan), which is an analysis and translation of the 17th-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi’s map of the Nile River and the corresponding sections of the tenth book of his Book of Travels. He also has a recent book chapter entitled “Defining and Defaming the Other Early Seventeenth-century Ottoman Invective” in Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility, and Distrust in Premodern Ottoman Lands, as well as several scholarly articles and reviews in such journals as the Journal of Turkish Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and The Journal of Ottoman Studies. He has also done extensive translation work, including a full translation of the collected poetry of Sultan Mehmed II.

He was the recipient of a junior residential fellowship at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) in 2012/2013, and has participated in numerous international scholarly conferences held by such organizations as the International Congress of Ottoman Social and Economic History (ICOSEH), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Comité International des Études Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes (CIÉPO), the Social History Society (SHS), and the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).

His research interests include early modern literature, particularly as comparative between European and Islamicate literatures; satire, invective, lampoon, and libel and their relation to literary genre studies; early modern cartography and its relation to changing conceptions of the world; and the interrelations between comparative literature and comparative history/historiography.

He has taught courses in ancient and modern humanities, Ottoman and other early modern literatures, Turkish literary criticism, modern Turkish literature, modern Turkish history, and world literatures.