Education

B.A., University of Chicago

Ph.D., Harvard University

Biography

Dimitri J. Kastritsis is an academic librarian who provides research support and instructional services to a wide range of faculty and students at UVA. He is also an active researcher on the premodern Ottoman Empire, and more broadly the Middle East from antiquity to the present, including Byzantium and the medieval Islamic world. Prior to his current position, he held a variety of research and teaching appointments, notably Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews (equivalent to tenured Associate Professor). He is a founding member of the Comparative Cultures Seminar and Harvard Greece Program, affiliated with the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. His fellowships include membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship in Byzantine Studies. He is the author and editor of a number of books, journal articles, and book chapters, most of which focus on the political and intellectual history of the fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire.

Main Publications

2023  Main editor (with Anna Stavrakopoulou and Angus Stewart) Imagined Geographies in the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Beyond (Washington, DC: Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies)

2022  “Ottoman Urbanism and Capital Cities before the Conquest of Constantinople (1453),” in Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism, ed. Elizabeth Key Fowden, Suna Çağaptay, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill and Louise Blanke (Oxford: Oxbow), 287–305

2020  “Tales of Viziers and Wine: Interpreting Early Ottoman Narratives of State Centralization,” in Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia, ed. Jo Van Steenbergen, (Leiden and Boston: Brill), 224–254

2017  An Early Ottoman History: The Oxford Anonymous Chronicle (Bodleian Marsh 313) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press)

2016  “The Alexander Romance and the Rise of the Ottoman Empire,” in Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-century Anatolia, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and S. N. Yıldız (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag), 243–283

2013  “The Historical Epic Ahvāl-i Sultān Mehemmed (The Tales of Sultan Mehmed) in the Context of Early Ottoman Historiography,” in Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future, ed. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1–22

2011  “The Trebizond Alexander Romance (Venice Hell. Inst. Cod. Gr. 5): The Ottoman Fate of a Fourteenth-century Illustrated Byzantine Manuscript,” Journal of Turkish Studies 36 (2011): 103–131

2007  The Sons of Bayezid: Empire Building and Representation in the Ottoman Civil War of 1402-1413 (Leiden and Boston: Brill)