Aleksandar Shopov is a historian with interests in economic and environmental histories of the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. His research and activism have focused on the history of and present-day debates about urban agriculture, especially in Istanbul. He received his MA from Sabanci University in Istanbul in 2007 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2016. His dissertation explored connections between Early Modern farming manuscripts in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, the rise of agrarian capitalism, and environmental change in the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. He previously held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Library in Washington DC, the Research Center for Anatolian Civilization in Istanbul, the Center for Mamluk Studies in Bonn and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
Aleksandar was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG between 2019–2021 and returned in summer 2022 as a visiting scholar.
Current Projects
Completed Projects
Selected Publications
Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). “‘Fezzan is the Siberia of Africa’: Desert and Society in the Prison Memoir of Pavel Shatev (1882–1951), an Anarchist from Ottoman Macedonia.” Global Environment 12 (1): 237–253. https://doi.org/10.3197/ge.2019.120110.
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Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). “‘Books on Agriculture (al-filāha) Pertaining to Medical Science’ and Ottoman Agricultural Science and Practice around 1500.” In Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. G. Necipoğlu, C. Kafadar, and C. H. Fleischer, 557–568. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004402508_017.
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Shopov, Aleksandar (2019). “Cities of Rice: Risiculture and Environmental Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Balkans.” Levant 51 (2): 169–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/00758914.2020.1807127.
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Shopov, Aleksandar (2020). “The Vernacularization of Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Agricultural Science in its Economic Context.” In Living with Nature and Things: Contributions to a New Social History of the Middle Islamic Periods, ed. B. J. Walker, 639–681. Göttingen: V&R unipress.
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Past Events
Conference
Towards a Global History of Soil: Sciences, Practices, Materialities and Mobilities, 1100-1700
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