Valentina Izmirlieva

Valentina Izmirlieva is Professor of Slavic Cultures at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1999. She has published widely on the interdependence of religious and political cultures in multi-religious empires and their successor states, with topics ranging from the medieval societies of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions to the post-Soviet cultural space. She founded and leads the global initiative Black Sea Networks and is currently the Director of the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Columbia.

During the Fellowship, Izmirlieva will be completing a monograph about the Christian hajjis of the Ottoman Empire—a distinct group of Eastern Orthodox pilgrims to Jerusalem who took as their model the Muslim Hajj to Mecca.