Miri Shefer-Mossensohn
Associate Professor
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Historian of the Ottoman Empire, Health and Medicine. and Head of the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies.
Email:
Website
academia.edu
About
I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History at Tel Aviv University, and since December 2019 I am the Head of the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies.
My research is at the juncture of three fields of historical research: the early modern Ottoman Empire; Islamic medicine, health and illness; and Muslim environmental history. My ultimate purpose is to unravel social and cultural realities in the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking worlds. Grants from the Israel Science Foundation and the German-Israeli Foundation facilitate these research projects.
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In my various administrative positions, I aim at contributing to an enriching and supportive framework so that faculty and students can make the most of their intellectual challenges and social experiences at TAU. As the Head of the School, I wish to advance historical research at TAU and in Israel as a whole, and to promote the teaching of history in Israeli academia. I embrace our role as public historians who contribute to a more complex, humane, and humanistic understanding of our realities.
I am also a very proud mother of two princesses, Ella and Daphna. I share with them and with my husband my love of kebap meat, Turkish music, and lots and lots of books.
Current Research
My current research explores how medicine was managed, organized, and supervised in the Ottoman Empire of the early modern period. I ask what was considered proper medical care and examine who was involved in creating and maintaining a medical standard. I trace the evolution of bureaucratic patterns (alongside the rise of the state machinery), and how these do not replace, but rather are integrated into, the perceptions and practices of those who are not experts, i.e., patients and their families, who continue to be important factors in shaping the professional medical consensus.
Courses
Co-director of the Medical Trust and Faith Lab
Death in Muslim Societies
Turkey: State, Society, Environment
Introduction to the History of Arabs and Islam 600-1500
Introduction to the Ottoman Empire
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Graduate Students
I would be happy to supervise master and doctoral research students on topics related to my research: early Ottoman history; health, medicine, well-being, and environment in Islamic contexts. If you are interested in developing projects within these frameworks, you are most welcome to contact me.
Publications
As a scholar of Ottoman science and medicine, I have published Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions 1500-1700 (State University of New York Press, 2009). The Turkish edition was published by Kitap in Istanbul in 2014. In another book, I explain how Ottomans "did" science: Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge (University of Texas Press, 2015). I am pleased that this book too was translated into Turkish (Türkiye Ä°ÅŸ Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2018), and am especially gratified there is an Arabic edition, published in Beirut and Algiers.
Alongside these academic publishing projects, I also address the general Israeli audience. Islam: A Brief Introduction (Tel Aviv University, The Publishing House and Mapa Publishing House, 2006) sketches the 1400-plus years of Islamic religious history for Hebrew readers. Another book in Hebrew, Knowledge, Science, and Technology in the Ottoman Empire was written for the Open University course "The Ottoman Empire: Selected Issues" (2015). In the spring of 2013, a series of lectures on medicine, health, and death in Muslim societies was broadcasted on the Israeli Army Radio (Galei Tzahal) program, “Broadcast University”.
In recent years I have started to be active academically in digital media. I recently completed the development of "Arab-Islamic History: From Tribes to Empire," a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on the history of the Middle East, 7th - 15th centuries. I teamed with TAU Online – Learning Innovation Center to create these contents for the edX platform (Harvard and MIT). The process of development was a fascinating operation of integrating content and innovative teaching forms. Teaching a course to thousands of people worldwide (we are almost 14,000 people...) is an exciting experience; The interaction with hundreds of learners from all over the Muslim world is especially enriching and contributes to my classes at TAU.