Barbara Henning is a historian with a focus on Ottoman and Turkish history. In October 2024, she was appointed to the chair for Turkish and Ottoman Studies at Hamburg University, where she is also a member of the Research Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts. Before joining Hamburg University, she served as Assistant Professor for the History of the Eastern Mediterranean at Mainz University, where she continues to follow her keen interest in entanglements, cultural translation and knowledge transfer in the Eastern Mediterranean as a member of the DFG Research Training Group Byzantium and the Euro-Mediterranean Cultures of War. In addition, her research interests include Ottoman- Kurdish history, the history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, imperial elites, phenomena of post-imperial transformations, identity and memory politics, self-narratives and biographies, as well as the history of knowledge and education. Her current work explores questions of social difference and status claims in Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts, focusing on the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. She studied Islamic Studies, Arabic, and Social Anthropology (B.A.), as well as Turkish Studies (M.A.) in Halle, Bamberg, and Paris, with a focus on late-Ottoman and Turkish-Republican history. She was a doctoral fellow at the Graduate School for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and received her Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of Bamberg with a dissertation on the history of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani family. From 2018 to 2020, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the DFG Priority Program Transottomanica, conducting a research project on Ottoman conceptualizations of social boundaries.

“I only recently discovered the library’s unique collection and rich history, in the context of a conservatory survey prepared under the auspices of Davidson MacLaren, a research associate and dear colleague at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Hamburg University. In the spring of 2025, I arrived in Rhodes to work together with a wonderful team of international experts from Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Tasked to assess the material conditions of the collection and map out its current and future needs, we quickly realized that whatever we might have planned, the library itself, as a living repository, had its own agenda for us, and its own stories it wanted to tell. The traces left by others who had browsed the shelves before me and engaged with the collection in centuries and decades past have occupied my thoughts ever since, and I am therefore deeply grateful to be part of this Conversation sparked by the library.”

Barbara Henning

* Research for this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC 2176 “Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures”, project no. 390893796. The project was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.