by Dr. Yeliz Teber (Wolfson College, University of Oxford)

The Kizilbash/Alevism-Bektashism Symposium: New Corpora, Databases, and Digital Tools in Ottoman and Contemporary Contexts, generously supported by the Past & Present Society, was held successfully at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, on 22 May 2026. Convened by Dr. Yeliz Teber, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the symposium brought together established and emerging scholars working on the history, culture, religion, and heritage of Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi communities, who constitute the largest religious minority in today’s Sunni-majority Turkey. As the first event of its kind dedicated specifically to digitally engaged approaches to Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi studies, the symposium provided a unique platform for scholarly exchange on new methodologies, sources, and research questions within this rapidly expanding field.

Event photograph, attributable to Hüsamettin Şimşir, Daniel Burt, Yeliz Teber, and Bedriye Poyraz, all rights reserved the respective holder (2026)

The symposium featured nine research papers presented by scholars from the UK and abroad, exploring a wide range of themes and long-standing questions in the field. In the morning panel, Mark Soileau advanced a novel methodological approach to the study of the hagiography of Hacı Bektaşi, a major text narrating the life and legends of the patron-saint of the Bektashi Sufi order, by drawing on a corpus of 103 manuscripts. Soileau demonstrated how the tracing of textual and paratextual features across manuscript networks can reveal complex patterns of transmission, continuity, and transformation beyond conventional models. Yeliz Teber introduced the first systematic study of the Hacı Bektaş shrine collection, highlighting the significance of documenting and analysing this largely unexplored corpus of manuscripts, paintings, and objects through a database to understand Alevi-Bektashi material culture and heritage after a century of dispersal and loss. Gökçen B. Dinç presented a new digital humanities project that uses computational analysis of vernacular religious texts to map the vocabulary of ‘Islam in Turkish’, offering new evidence for the centrality of Alevi traditions in shaping broader Turkish Muslim religiosity and recovering overlooked Alevi-Bektashi voices from modern scholarship.

Event photograph, attributable to Hüsamettin Şimşir, Daniel Burt, Yeliz Teber, and Bedriye Poyraz, all rights reserved the respective holder (2026)

The first afternoon panel started with the presentations of Kumru Berfin Emre and Bedriye Poyraz, who offered important perspectives on the 1937-38 Dersim Massacre, combining survivor testimonies, mapped massacre sites, and visual archives to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary approaches for recovering suppressed histories and cultural memory. Sinibaldo de Rosa showed how movement notation and digital humanities methodologies can transform Alevi ritual dance into a searchable and analysable embodied archive, contributing to approaches to documenting, preserving, and studying intangible cultural heritage.

Event photograph, attributable to Hüsamettin Şimşir, Daniel Burt, Yeliz Teber, and Bedriye Poyraz, all rights reserved the respective holder (2026)

The final panel highlighted the work of the Alevi-Bektashi Digital Archive (ABDA) project, a major collaborative initiative under the principal investigation of Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, who first presented the archive’s efforts to preserve endangered manuscripts, oral histories, and audiovisual heritage through a publicly accessible digital repository. Yasemin Karakuş demonstrated how newly digitised manuscript collections in this corpus are transforming our understanding of Alevi-Bektashi literary culture through the recovery of previously unknown texts, poets, and paratextual materials. Finally, Özkan Karabulut showcased how digital corpus analysis and mapping of Alevi poetry collections are revealing new insights into the circulation of texts, canon formation, collective memory, and religious history. Together, the panel illustrated the transformative potential of digital humanities approaches for preserving and reinterpreting Alevi-Bektashi cultural heritage. 

Event photograph, attributable to Hüsamettin Şimşir, Daniel Burt, Yeliz Teber, and Bedriye Poyraz, all rights reserved the respective holder (2026)

The event generated significant interest within and beyond the University of Oxford. Owing to exceptionally strong interest in the event, the number of registered audience members was increased from the originally planned 15 participants to 25 attendees (excluding speakers). This expanded audience included academics, graduate students, and independent researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, creating a vibrant environment for discussion and networking. The symposium fostered new connections between scholars working on related topics and encouraged interdisciplinary conversations that will support future collaborations and research initiatives. 

Event photograph, attributable to Hüsamettin Şimşir, Daniel Burt, Yeliz Teber, and Bedriye Poyraz, all rights reserved the respective holder (2026)

The generous support of the Past and Present Society was instrumental in enabling the successful delivery of this symposium. The funding helped create an inclusive and intellectually stimulating forum that enhanced the visibility of Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi studies within Oxford’s wider research community and beyond. The strong attendance, high-quality papers, and productive discussions demonstrated both the growing scholarly interest in the field and the value of supporting specialist forums that bring together researchers working on underrepresented histories, cultures, and communities. I am deeply grateful to the Past & Present Society for its generous support and for helping make this event possible.

Event photograph, attributable to Hüsamettin Şimşir, Daniel Burt, Yeliz Teber, and Bedriye Poyraz, all rights reserved the respective holder (2026)

Past and Present was pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

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by the Past and Present editorial team

Past and Present was delighted to learn that Dr. Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (University of Amsterdam) has been shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Early Career Article Prize 2026 for his article “Colonial world-making and global knowledges at the early modern Cape of Good Hope” (Open Access) published in Past & Present #268.

Graphic via the Royal Historical Society, all rights reserved (2026)

Dr. Giovannetti-Singh’s work is one of eight articles shortlisted for the prize. Two winners will be announced in July 2026 each of whom will be awarded a prize of £250. The Royal Historical Society states that “the 2026 shortlist recognises the scholarly contribution of the eight articles published in 2025”. Our congradulations and best wishes to Dr. Giovannetti-Singh and all whose work has been recognised by being shortlisted this year.

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received from Dr. Yeliz Teber (Wolfson College, University of Oxford)

Event: KIZILBASH/ALEVISM-BEKTASHISM SYMPOSIUM: New Corpora, Databases, and Digital Tools in Ottoman and Contemporary Contexts

Taking place: Friday 22 May 2026

Location: Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Registration: by e-mail to the symposium convener Dr. Yeliz Teber (yeliz.teber@ames.ox.ac.uk). All welcome.

Full programme: can be downloaded here

Event Overview

The Alevis (historically known as Kizilbash) and Bektashis constitute the largest religious minority in Sunni-majority Turkey, drawing from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Turkish, Kurdish, and Zaza, with diasporas across Europe and North America. Rooted in an esoteric form of Sufi mysticism and the veneration of Caliph Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad, the Kizilbash/Alevis-Bektashis have often been perceived as ‘heretical’ and persecuted during both the Ottoman and Turkish Republican periods. Despite the community’s marginalisation, Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi studies have grown rapidly in recent years, challenging some of the dominant narratives in broader Islamic, Ottoman, and Turkish scholarship.

In response to this growth, the Kizilbash/Alevism-Bektashism Symposium provides a rare opportunity to bring together established and emerging scholars of Alevi-Bektashi studies from the UK and abroad at the University of Oxford. It is the first of its kind globally to focus on digitally engaged projects on Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi material culture and heritage in Ottoman and contemporary contexts. Over the past five years, scholarship has increasingly moved towards large-scale digital research methods, including the digitisation of historical sources such as manuscripts and documents, mapping villages and sacred sites, conducting digitally informed ethnographic fieldwork, and documenting intangible cultural heritage such as ritual songs and dances. Given these exciting developments, this timely symposium is organised to showcase and connect new and ambitious projects around several key research questions:

What elements of Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi history and present-day experiences have only become visible through the digital corpora, databases, and tools we now possess? What do these projects
reveal about the historical trajectory of Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi traditions? How can we assess lost Alevi-Bektashi materials, and what does this loss reveal about power, voice, and memory? How have rituals, cultural practices, and intellectual life shaped the community’s collective identity? What traces of violence have marked Kizilbash/Alevi-Bektashi history and self-perception? Finally, in what ways has modern scholarship framed and influenced contemporary understandings of the community in Turkey and the diaspora?

Generously funded by Oxford’s Khalili Research Centre and Wolfson College, as well as the Past & Present Society, this one-day symposium will convene ten papers to foster collaboration and enhance visibility at the vibrant research environment of Wolfson College on 22 May 2026.

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received from Dr. Ana Struillou (King College London) and Dr. Kaja Cook (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Date and Times: 22 May 2026 (09:00 – 18:00)

Format: his will be a hybrid workshop. The online link will be circulated via email in advance of the session.

Registration: via this form

Event Overview

Join CEMS on Friday 22nd May for a one-day workshop on interactions between the Iberian Atlantic and North Africa. This workshop has been organised by Dr. Ana Struillou (KCL) and Dr. Kaja Cook (Royal Holloway) and has been generously supported by Past & Present.

Pre-modern Maghribi societies have so far been marginalised in Atlantic history and predominant global history narratives, being perceived as static and backward. Building on important scholarship on the African diaspora and Muslim presence in the Americas that has greatly contributed to enriching the picture of the early modern Atlantic and the Spanish Empire in particular, this workshop will explore how North Africans actively participated in, and helped constitute, the Iberian Atlantic world, be it as corsairs raiding the Iberian Islands of Madeira and the Canaries or as enslaved and free communities shaping the culture of the early modern Spanish Americas.

At the same time, this workshop reverses the perspective of this scholarship by considering how African societies, particularly North African ones, were far from indifferent to Spanish colonial expansion into the Atlantic and how they were shaped as a result of the new ideas, commodities, and people crossing the Atlantic.

Several papers will be specifically dedicated to uncovering material circulations between North Africa and the Americas. In recent years, a number of scholars have emphasized the intellectual engagement of the Muslim world with Spanish overseas possessions by studying Ottoman maps and ethnographical writings on the Americas. However, research has mostly concentrated on learned communities active in Constantinople. This workshop will enrich understandings of the relations between the Muslim world and European overseas possessions by investigating the tangible circulation of American goods in the Maghrib, rather than solely intellectual knowledge. This shift will uncover engagement with the Americas within the Muslim world, at a much deeper social level and beyond imperial capitals.

Provisional Schedule

09:00–09:30|Opening remarks

Kaja Cook and Ana Struillou

09:30–12:00| Session 1: Enslavement and Forced Mobilities

Chair: Toby Green (King’s College London)

Joseph Jackson-Eade (Tel Aviv University)

‘O qual Negro se chamava Vitória’: Enslaved Bodies, Sexual Deviance and the Gendering of the Atlantic-Mediterranean Space through the Lisbon Inquisition’s gaze, 1550-1560

Antonio de Almeida Mendes (Université de Nantes)

Lexicons of Slavery between Seventeenth-Century Portugal and Morocco

Claudia Geremia (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

Ritual Knowledge across the North African–Iberian Atlantic: Enslaved Women, Mobility, and Cultural Translation (16th–18th centuries)

Lucas Emanuel Rocha Vicente (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora)

The Tamazigh Afro-Islamic Diaspora in 16th-century Portugal

12:00|Lunch

13:30–15:30| Session 2: Knowledge and Ideas at the Edge of Empire

Chair: Rebecca Earle (University of Warwick)

Toby Yuen-Gen Liang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

Northwest Africa in Early Modern European Cartography: Representations of Space and the Shaping of the Atlantic World

Ana Struillou (King’s College London)

“Ficus, Tuna, Taknarit”: Invasive Species, Trans-Imperial Ecologies, and the Early Modern Archive

Andrew Devereux (University of California, San Diego)

African Antiquities in the Debates over New World Slavery (16th century)

15:45–17:30| Session 3: Itineraries across the Iberian–Maghribi Atlantic

Chair: Francisco Bethencourt (King’s College London)

Karim Bejjit (Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Tétouan)

The English Colony of Tangier and Transatlantic Connections: Trade, Slavery and Mobility

Kaja Cook (Royal Holloway, University of London)

‘Of the caste and descendance of kings’: The circulation of ideas about Nobility Among the Descendants of the Mexica, Inca, and Nasrid Rulers

Miguel Soto Garrido (University of Oxford)

Between Gibraltar and the Indies: Diplomacy, American Goods, and Circulation in Saadian Morocco (c. 1578–1605)

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by Dr. James Baillie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

One week ago (13-14 March) the Medieval Caucasus Network had its first international conference! We gathered at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel for two days of hybrid format discussions.

The theme of the conference, led by Dr. John Latham-Sprinkle as its senior organiser, was studying non-elites in the medieval Caucasus. While exact definitions of a non-elite can vary significantly, a point discussed throughout the conference, the majority of people in the medieval Caucasus were clearly outside its socially and economically elite echelons. Non-elites represent most of human life: most of the food eaten and wine drunk, most of the stories spoken into a night sky and lost to time, most of the births and deaths and hopes and tears. Despite this, many of them are nearly invisible to us: lying outside the written record of states and chroniclers, and sometimes leaving little archaeological trace, the lives of even relatively wealthy specialist non-elites like merchants and craftspeople are rarely discoverable in the medieval period, let alone the much larger mass of agricultural labourers and pastoralists who made up most of the population. Working out how we can – and when we cannot – best reach the lives of these people was a topic this conference tackled in a wide variety of ways.

Across two days, we heard from twenty speakers representing institutions across nine countries (the UK, Switzerland, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Belgium, Turkey, Egypt, Austria, and the Czech Republic). The range of talks was hugely varied, including reflections on how different farming patterns and soil types in the North Caucasus might tell a story of power and more or less resistance to it, Sasanian legal conditions and the difference between punishments for commoners and nobility, and the ways in which Neoplatonic philosophical discourses could be used either for or against elitist ideas of social structures.

These bits of information can seem sparse, but all contribute to building up our limited and vital picture of the non-elites of the medieval Caucasus. Approaching the topic from a wide array of angles can unearth individual vignettes that tell us more about the different possibilities of non-elite life: a non-elite Georgian saint having his plans for a monastery rejected by local nobles, the nurse of a local lord’s child setting up multiple stone inscriptions and paying for masses to be said at nearby Armenian monasteries, or the women who acted as patrons of mosques in Dagestan whose names are still inscribed there. Using source material ranging from building archaeology to the art-historical analysis of portrayals of dancing women in medieval manuscripts to reading about the conditions faced by non-noble scribes and recorded in Armenian colophons, many different, if small, windows can be opened on non-elite life.

Much of the way we discover these people is through their interactions with power. Sometimes this was directly and violently antagonistic, as non-elites (and perhaps former elites) found their religious practices suppressed by the Christianising rulers of Caucasian Albania, recorded only as demonised echoes in our remaining sources. More often it involved negotiating a way through a world not built for them – women trying to find protection under the legal codes of Cilician Armenia, or people around Lake Van in the early modern period navigating new stereotypes and discourses to make sense of a world in crisis. Some more mobile non-elites found ways to make themselves brokers and navigate between powers, with late medieval merchants forming crucial diplomatic channels between different potentates.

For those further from being visible to power, archaeological approaches are often key. We also heard about a range of vital projects working towards compiling new information we need to tackle these problems: cataloguing the Tapanakar grave marker stones of Armenia and their iconography, using innovative DNA and isotope analysis to see how much people in medieval Caucasian cemeteries had moved around from cradle to grave, and new settlement archaeology that is showing more about the types and shapes and forms of buildings around which medieval Caucasians lived their lives day by day.

This was all brought together with talks that focused on methodology and the ways we think about non-elites in the medieval past. This included a discussion of using structured data to catalogue, frame and test our own thinking about non-elite groups, and also our two keynotes by Irina Arzhantseva and Nik Matheou. Prof. Arzhantseva talked about the ways in which the archaeological indicators of wealth and success could vary greatly, with trade routes and landscapes potentially greatly influencing the formation of different social status patterns – but also with survivability greatly affecting what we can still see from those societies. Nik Matheou meanwhile suggested that seeing the Caucasus as a shatter-zone, an area of potential friction to power, helps us understand the everyday resistance that most ordinary medieval Caucasians could have to those who sought to govern them, showing how even centres of power struggled to bring their immediate neighbouring communities to heel. He suggested, too, that rather than seeing the lack of written source material on non-elites as their failure to be remembered, we might see it as a success for many of the people we study – making their lives less legible to power, less easy to control, and determining more of their own social and economic fates far from the written page.

With that, one of the most important things that remained was to note that one of the most important things in this field of study is to keep talking and keep cooperating to build the best picture we can from our scattered evidence. We very much hope our conference contributed to that, and would like to thank all our speakers and attendees for their wonderful and thoughtful contributions over the two days. Thanks also to all of our sponsors: our hosts at VUB, the Past & Present Society, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, the FWO (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen), the Catholic University of Louvain, the FNRS (Fonds de la recherche scientifique), and the University of Ghent.

This blog was originally published on the website of The Medieval Caucasus Network. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

Photographs of the event supplied by the organisers