In my work I historicize the concept of conversion, which can denote changing from one religion to another, becoming an observant member of one’s own religion, or radically transforming social and cultural practices and other means of identification.

My first book is entitled Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe. In it I propose a novel approach to the historical record of Islamic conversions during the Ottoman age and gather fresh insights concerning the nature of religious conversion itself. Rather than attempting to explain Ottoman Islamization in terms of the converts’ motives, I instead concentrate on the proselytizers—in this case, none other than the sultan himself. Mehmed IV (1648-87) is remembered as an aloof ruler whose ineffectual governing led to the disastrous siege of Vienna. Through an integrated reading of previously unexamined Ottoman literary texts, I underscore instead the sultan’s zeal for bringing converts to Islam.

As an expression of his rededication to Islam, Mehmed IV actively sought to establish his reputation as a convert-maker, convincing or compelling Christian and Jewish subjects to be “honored by the glory of Islam,” and Muslim subjects to turn to Islamic piety. Revising the conventional portrayal of a ruler so distracted by his passion for hunting that he neglected affairs of state, I show that Mehmed IV saw his religious involvement as central to his role as sultan. I trace an ever-widening range of reform, conversion, and conquest expanding outward from the heart of Mehmed IV’s empire.

This account is the first to correlate the conversion of people and space in the mature Ottoman Empire, to investigate conversion from the perspective of changing Ottoman ideology, and to depict the sultan as an interventionist convert maker. The resulting insights promise to rework our understandings of the reign of a forgotten ruler, a largely neglected period in Ottoman history, the changing nature of Islam and its history in Europe, relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Europe, the practice of jihad, and religious architecture in urban history.

Along with researching religious conversion in the early modern Ottoman Empire, I also explore cultural conversion, or the conversion from religious to secular identities in modern Europe. My second book, Secret Jews, Cosmopolitanism, and the End of Empire: The Donme of Salonica, which is based on architectural, epigraphic, oral, archival, literary, and official sources I have collected or recorded in Salonica, Greece, and Istanbul, concerns the struggles faced by a hybrid religious community as the plural Ottoman society organized around religious identities was replaced by the Turkish Republic which aimed to create a single, homogenous, secular culture. The experience of the Dönme, descendants of Jews who converted to Islam in the seventeenth century in the wake of the messianic movement of Shabbatai Tzevi, yet who maintained into the twentieth century a unique religion that was distinct from Judaism and Islam, illustrates the problems that accompanied radical social transformation in the period from the 1880s to 1945. The study contributes to debates concerning race, ethnicity, and the construction of majorities and minorities, and the scholarly literature on identification, nationalism, citizenship, and secularization as it follows the experience of the Donme in Ottoman Salonica, Greek Salonica, and finally Turkish Istanbul.