A. Tunç Şen

A. Tunç Şen is a historian of the Ottoman Empire who studies social and cultural intellectual practices, focusing on how people perceived the world and organized knowledge within political, social, and emotional frameworks.

His forthcoming book, Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2025), examines how the expertise and authority of occult scientific practitioners were constructed and contested in the early modern imperial context. Şen is currently working on two additional projects: one on the history of education and scholarly life in the early modern Ottoman world through microhistory and emotional history, and another on Ottoman Islamic manuscripts that reached European collections as war booty during the early modern period.

Şen is also a member of an international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition (GHOST): Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

In Paris, Şen will conduct in-depth archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on 16th- and 17th-century Islamic manuscripts acquired during Mediterranean maritime conflicts, focusing on their material features to uncover the social history of Ottoman military readers. He will also advance research on key figures in early French Orientalism linked to imperial and diplomatic networks.