Orit Bashkin | Mordecai and Haman in the Ottoman Empire: Jewish Political Allegories and Ottoman Imperial Power

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Orit Bashkin (2023–24 SHC Fellow) is a historian who works on the intellectual, social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. She received her PhD from Princeton University (2004), writing a thesis on Iraqi intellectual history, and her BA (1995) and MA (1999) from Tel Aviv University. Since graduation, she has been working in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her publications deal with Iraqi history, the history of Middle Eastern and Iraqi Jews, the Arab cultural revival movement (the nahda) in the late 19th century, and the connections between history, memory, and literature. Her current research project explores the celebrations of Purim in the Ottoman Empire.

She is the author of the books Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel, Stanford University Press, 2017; New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq, Stanford University Press, 2012; The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq, Stanford University Press, 2009. She is the co-editor of the volumes Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity, with Joshua Levinson, Penn Press, 2021; Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, with Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, and others, Oxford University Press, 2015