Biography

Duygu Yıldırım received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 2021 with her dissertation, ‘The Age of the Perplexed: Translating Nature and Bodies between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1650-1730.’ Her research focuses on comparative and connected histories of science and medicine in the early modern Mediterranean world. It questions what made translations successful, and explains how they created new perceptions of nature, human bodies, faith, and uncertainty in the early modern world.

Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Renaissance Society of America, the NEH Summer Institute, the Rare Books School at the University of Virginia, Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Dan David Prize Scholarship, among others.

As a Max Weber Fellow, she will revise her dissertation for publication and work on publications emerging from the revision and expansion of her dissertation research. As a member of the Natural Things|Ad Fontes Naturae research group, Yıldırım is one of the editors of a forthcoming volume, Natural Things: Ecologies of Knowledge in the Early Modern World.

Expertise for Teaching and Mentoring of Ph.D. Researchers
At Stanford, Duygu taught courses on science and medicine in the Islamic world, the history of plague, and early modern world history. Her teaching interests include the relationship between faith and science, early modern Orientalism, and cross-cultural encounters between the Ottoman Empire and Europe.