Yıldırım awarded 2023 ACLS Fellowship
Duygu Yıldırım, an assistant professor of history at UT, has been awarded a 2023 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in support of her book project, Uncertain Knowledge: The Making of Slow Science between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe.
The ACLS Fellowship Program supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that has the potential to make significant contributions within and beyond the awardees’ fields. Yıldırım is one of 60 early-career scholars from around the country who were selected through a multi-stage peer review from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants. ACLS Fellowships provide between $30,000 and $60,000 to support scholars during six to 12 months of sustained research and writing.
“With higher education under sustained attack around the country, ACLS is proud to support this diverse cohort of emerging scholars as they work to increase understanding of our connected human histories, cultures, and experiences,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “ACLS
Fellowships are investments in an inclusive future where scholars are free to pursue rigorous, unflinching humanistic research.”
Yıldırım’s work explores the role of uncertainty during the globalization of scientific and medical knowledge in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Her book project will show how the rhetoric of uncertainty became a new mode of inquiry and a highly productive new strategy to accommodate emerging anxieties about human diversity, confessional and inter-religious conflict, and the fragmentary knowledge of newly circulated medicinal substances and plants.
Taking comparative and connective perspectives that bridge the Ottoman and European contexts of the early modern period, Yıldırım’s book will offer a more granular picture of knowledge-making during a time when science lost its assertive firmness and became more provisional, revocable, and all-in-all slower in an increasingly global world.
Yıldırım was previously awarded a 2023-2024 Faculty Research Fellowship from the UT Humanities Center. As an ACLS Fellow, she will still participate in the Humanities Center’s events throughout the year alongside the center’s cohort of fellows.