This seminar takes as its subject those who lived on the margins of the Ottoman Empire — enslaved persons, sexual outsiders, intellectual dissenters, ethnic and religious minorities, the disabled, and the non-human. Fleeting or oblique in the sources, these figures nonetheless unsettle dominant narratives of empire and offer vital insight into how imperial power, affect, violence, and resistance were lived and contested from below.

We welcome contributions that engage with a wide range of materials — literary texts (canonical and popular), travelogues, court records, hagiographies, archival documents, visual culture, and oral traditions — to examine how the Ottoman periphery was narrated, imagined, and disputed. We are particularly interested in work that interrogates categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and that draws from critical approaches such as subaltern studies, queer theory, postcolonial critique, disability studies, critical animal studies, and comparative empire studies.

Potential topics might include:

• Archival silence and the politics of textual erasure
• Representations of enslaved or manumitted individuals in literature and archival sources
• Gender-nonconforming or sexually marginalized figures in courtly, mystical, or popular narratives
• The politics of visibility and representation of religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities
• Storytelling, rumor, and folklore as counter-histories
• Peripherality in geographic, social, or epistemological terms
• Animal metaphors and the politics of dehumanization

The seminar format invites sustained dialogue rather than one-off exchange, and we hope to build a collaborative conversation among scholars working on Ottoman texts across time periods and geographies. We especially encourage submissions from literary studies, history, anthropology, art history, and adjacent fields that foreground understudied texts or offer new theoretical perspectives.