Biography

Duygu Yıldırım is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2021. She is co-editor of Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023), and her work has appeared in Journal of Early Modern History, British Journal for the History of Science, History of Science, History of Religions, among others. She was a recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for the 2023–24 academic year. She is currently completing her first monograph, Uncertain Knowledge: The Making of Slow Science between the Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe.

Project Summary

Uncertain Knowledge is about different forms of uncertainty—material, social, and intellectual—unfolding through a series of interactions between the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It explores how knowledge was negotiated, traveled, translated, questioned, and often left unresolved. In relation to science, uncertainty has long been regarded as a productive epistemic virtue—a necessary catalyst in the pursuit and advancement of scientific knowledge. When prolonged or left unresolved, it can just as easily appear as a flaw, a limitation in the quest for certain knowledge (scientia) as an ideal. Yet the wide range of protagonists of this project engaged with fragmentary and sometimes contradictory bits of empirical information and reveled in uncertainty within an increasingly interconnected world. During that time, Ottoman and Italian scholars, physicians, natural philosophers, apothecaries, drug merchants, historians, and anonymous bazaar artisans alike embraced uncertainty not as an obstacle, but as a space of intellectual possibility. In an age marked by the expansion of global trade and the circulation of unfamiliar substances—coffee, ipecacuanha, sea coconut, tulips, even mummies—uncertainty became a useful tool to navigate their expertise. The broad outlines of “uncertainty” were both intentional and contingent, defined by what early modern scholars did and did not wish to know as well as their ability to access foreign languages, intellectual traditions, and scientific and medical practices.