Biography

Daria Kovaleva is a historian of culture with a specialization in the Eastern Mediterranean region. She is currently a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University working on her dissertation on the performance industry in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Istanbul. Her current research has been supported by Istanbul Research Institute, Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship, Orient-Institut Istanbul, Byzantine Studies Fellowship from Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies among others. Daria’s previous projects explored Jewish and Ottoman travel literature, Arabian Nights, cinematographic adaptations of historical sources, Ottoman imperial household. She received her MA in Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies in 2014 from the Central European University and Masters in Oriental and African Studies in 2011 from Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Project Summary

Daria Kovaleva's dissertation offers a new social and cultural microhistory of shadow puppeteers, comic impersonators, storytellers and other performers in the early modern Ottoman imperial capital. Her historical approach cuts across the disciplinary boundaries of Ottoman studies, the history of theater, literary studies, and Islamic intellectual and cultural history. Situating theatrical industry within Istanbul’s public sphere, this project explores the emergence of a public culture commensurable to the most populated urban centers of the early modern world, in the Mediterranean and elsewhere. In doing so, it demonstrates how the Ottoman Empire was not unlike its contemporaries when it came to the politics, economy, and sociology of the production of culture in general, and the production of spectacle in particular. This research pieces together highly fragmented evidence from a variety of sources, coming from multiple manuscript libraries and archives in Turkey, Italy, the Vatican City, France, Austria, the Netherlands in addition to various printed materials. At I Tatti, Kovaleva will focus on her chapter titled “Cultural Economies in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean.” This chapter explores trans-regional careers in performance in Istanbul from the late medieval to the early modern era. These careers fell within existing culture geographies, which had direct demographic implications on the social profiles of rising professionals seeking income and employment in the local market of performance.