Prof.Dr. Dejanirah Couto
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Section des Sciences Historiques et philologiques
En Sorbonne, Paris.
"Globalization: a new appraisal of Pîrî Reîs scientific network"
Pîrî Reîs, the famous Ottoman admiral and cartographer is someone whose scientific and intellectual legacy exceeds the borders of Turkey. A real cultural mediator, with numerous skills, interest for innovation and intellectual curiosity, the author of the ‘Kitab-ı Bahriyye’ connected scientific traditions and cultural heritages. He is, in this sense, a typical figure of the “Modernity”, a man of the Renaissance. However, even if Turkish and international historiographies devoted a great number of scholarly studies to him, we still need to better assess his methodology of work, his criteria to select information, and consequently to have a better knowledge of his milieu and of which scientific traditions he turned to. In order to obtain a clearer dressing of these issues, the conference will tackle the following points :
- What do we know about his cartographic atelier and about his international scientific network ?
- What sources of information did he used to build up some parts - specially about Africa and Asia - of his ‘Kitab-ı Bahriyye’ ?
Dejanirah Couto holds 2 Master degrees, a french Ph.D thesis in Byzantine History and an Habilitation in Modern History at the Univ. of Paris X-Nanterre (2006). She is currently teaching at the École Pratique des Hautes Études - Section des Sciences Historiques et Philologiques, Paris, in the area of Maritime history, History of Overseas European Expansion with a focus on early modern Asia and the Portuguese-Ottoman interactions in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (16th-17th centuries). She is interested in political, social and diplomatic aspects and has published widely about the Arabian provinces of the Ottoman empire (Southern Iraq, Egypt,Yemen), the Persian Gulf, Iran and India (16th century), and on a number of subjects related to these topics (diplomacy, cartography, maritime warfare, merchant networks). She has also developed an interest in historical and ethnographical writing (chronicles, geographies and travel accounts). Her current work is centered on Ottoman maritime warfare in the Indian Ocean, specially in the Red Sea and the comparative history of empires.
Between 2003 and 2006 she coordinated the international research project Historical Atlas of the Persian Gulf together with the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes Paris) and the University of Tehran (Iran). Member of the advisory board of five Historical Journals, she has been a member of the Team 3 of the European Science Foundation, and is actually a part of the EU Evaluation Panel for european universities scientific projects in the area of History.
She is also part of the french ANR (National Research Agency) international program on the Indian Ocean and of the FCT team, working on a new edition of the Comentarios de Don Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, (a Spanish ambassador and travelogue to India and Persia dating from the early 17th century) and on the introduction of the French edition of the Bahriye of Pîrî Reîs directed by Prof. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont (CNRS, Paris).
She has taught in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Germany, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Turkey, India, the USA, Brazil, and participated extensively in conferences in Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Italy, France, Belgium, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Bahreïn, India, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Canada and USA.
She was awarded the Palmes Academiques from the French Republic in 2008.