Associate Professor Betül Başaran
Associate Professor of Religious Studies Betül Başaran has received a prestigious institutional grant for St. Mary’s College of Maryland from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct a four-week seminar for college and university professors in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2016.
Her seminar is titled “Transcending Boundaries: The Ottoman Empire, Europe and the Mediterranean World, 1500-1800.” Sixteen scholars from around the country will join Başaran for an exploration of the history of religious, political and economic exchanges in the larger Mediterranean world in ways that transcend false distinctions between the so-called Christian and Islamic worlds and their societies in the early modern era.
NEH grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-review and selection process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities research and public engagement. The primary goal of the summer seminars is to advance humanities teaching.
“The grant projects announced today repre
sent the very best of humanities scholarship and programming,” said NEH Chairman William Adams in a press release announcing grant awards and offers in the month of July. “NEH is proud to support programs that illuminate the great ideas and events of our past, broaden access to our nation’s many cultural resources, and open up for us new ways of understanding the world in which we live.”
More information about the seminar can be found at http://grants.smcm.edu/neh-summer-seminar-2016/.