President's Note

Abstract

President’s Note Amy Singer The first “President’s Note” appeared in the previous issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (Vol. 5. no. 2, 2018). This brief column aims to provide a summary of news relevant to our organization from the past six months and to alert the members to upcoming events for the middle- and long-term. More immediate news and information are sent out to members by email, and some items are also posted to H-Turk, our H-Net network. If you are not currently subscribed to H-Turk, please find further details at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-turk. Nükhet Varlık has now taken over from Kent Schull as editor of JOTSA. This issue and those in planning to follow it will attest to her dynamic intellect and creative energies in continuing to develop this journal as a leading venue for publishing new and original scholarship in our field. Please consult the introductory pages of a recent JOTSA issue or the OTSA website for further instructions on submitting your original work to JOTSA publication or to contact the editor. OTSA is governed by nine people. These include the officers: President Amy Singer (2018–20), Treasurer Patricia Blessing, and Secretary Hale Yılmaz; and five Board members: Senem Aslan, Lale Can, Chris Gratien, Murat Yıldız, and İpek Yosmaoğlu. Aslan and Yıldız began their two-year terms this winter, and we look forward to their ongoing input on the Board. The immediate past-president continues to serve as a member of the Board for one year after formally turning over the office. We are grateful to Linda Darling, who has remained available for consultation on various matters even after the expiration of this one year. Indeed, this is an opportunity to thank many past presidents for continuing to contribute from their experience when called upon. It is equally important for our organization to draw on the expertise and wisdom of previous Board members as it is to bring new people into the Board regularly and to welcome new members to OTSA. [End Page 3] For those of you who have not yet visited, please have a look at the new organization website, found at https://www.ottomanturkishstudiesassociation.org. If you have suggestions for the site and wish to become involved in its management and curation, please contact the OTSA Secretariat at secretariattsa@gmail.com. OTSA is a membership organization. Annual dues entitle members to receive JOTSA as it appears, and members serve on OTSA committees and stand for election to become Board members and officers. These dues help to fund the OTSA prizes as well as to pay for costs associated with publishing JOTSA and for annual administrative costs of the organization. OTSA publishes JOTSA twice each year and holds its annual members’ meeting in conjunction with the annual Middle East Studies Association conference in the fall of each year. At that meeting, OTSA distributes awards that recognize achievements of scholarship at different phases of a research career and support student development in Ottoman and Turkish studies in several ways. The committees that select the winners are composed of members of the organization, and the committees are reformed annually so as to draw on a broad section of the membership. We applaud the 2018 winners and thank the various committee members for volunteering their time and expertise. The 2018 M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize was awarded to Alan Mikhail of Yale University for Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (University of Chicago Press, 2017). An Honorable Mention was awarded to Side Emre of Texas A&M University for Ibrahim-i Gulshani and the Khalwati-Gulshani Order: Power Brokers in Egypt (Brill, 2017). Committee members were Senem Aslan, chair (Bates College), Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University-Newark), and Carole Woodall (University of Colorado-Colorado Springs). The 2018 Sydney N. Fisher Graduate Student Paper Prize was awarded to Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak, PhD Candidate, McGill University and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), for his paper “Sovereignty and Legitimacy in an Age of Revolutions: The Ottoman...