Duygu Yıldırım is a historian of science and medicine specializing in the early modern Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire. She is mainly interested in how knowledge was communicated, evaluated, and rendered relevant within cross-cultural interactions. Her broader research interests include scientific labor, translation, visual cultures of science, and foodways.

Her first monograph, A History of Uncertainty: Science between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (forthcoming with the University of Pittsburgh Press), approaches uncertainty as a historical problem central to cross-cultural encounters. Drawing on multilingual textual and visual sources, the book shows how uncertainty became a productive mode of inquiry through which Ottomans and Europeans alike confronted unfamiliar substances, foreign expertise, and human diversity. 

She is also co-editor of Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023), which examines how natural things acquired new meanings, circulated across cultural and geographical boundaries, and became increasingly detached from their places of origin during the rise of the modern life sciences.

Her research and writing have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Dan David Prize Scholarship, Social Science Research Council, Renaissance Society of America, Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), and Stanford Humanities Center, among many others. Prior to joining UTK, she was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. In 2026, she was awarded a Berenson Fellowship at I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.

Selected Publications

Books

Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım, eds. Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (London & New York, NY: Routledge, 2023).

Peer-reviewed articles 

“Seventeenth-Century European Perspectives on Abstinence, Civility, and Islamic Wine Prohibition,” (accepted and forthcoming with Historical Journal)

“The Translating Subject: Self-Assertion and Edges of Mediation in Ali Ufkî’s Bilingual Dialogues.” Journal of Early Modern History 28 (2024): 415–34. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10095 

“Back to the Future: A Belated History of ‘New’ Science in the Ottoman Empire.” British Journal for the History of Science – Themes 9 (2024): 169–82. doi:10.1017/bjt.2024.9

“Ottoman Plants, Nature Studies, and the Attentiveness of Translational Labor,” History of Science 61 no 4 (2023): 497–521.  https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231191340.

“(Un)Making Labor Invisible: A Syllabus,” with Patrick Anthony, Juliana Broad, Xan Chacko, Zachary Dorner, and Judith Kaplan, History of Science 61 no 4 (2023): 608–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231180954

“Comparing Faiths: The Making of Religious Dialogue between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe,” History of Religions 63 no 2 (2023): 198-227. https://doi.org/10.1086/726716.

“Bevanda asiatica: Scholarly Exchange between the Ottomans and Europeans on Coffee,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 56 (2020): 25-48.

• Honorable Mention, FEEGI (The Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions) Article Prize, 2021.

Courses Taught

HIST 585: Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Middle East

HIME 450: Food, Health, and Society

HIST 499: Body, Sexuality, and Medicine in Islam

HIME 384: Ottomans and the World, 1300-1800

HIME 370: History of the Middle East in Global Context 

HIST 262: World Civilization 1500-Present