Christine Philliou is currently the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a Professor in the Department of History. Professor Philliou specializes in the region of the Balkans and the Middle East, specifically focused on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states. She has published Biography of Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), as well as Turkey: A Past Against History (2021). Dr. Philliou received her M.A. and PhD in History from Princeton University, and previously taught the history of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey at Columbia University.
To start, I would love to hear an introduction! What is your field of specialization, and how did you originally come to academia?
I am a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and specifically of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire into the nation-states of the Balkans and the Middle East. I particularly focus on the role and experience of Greek and Turkish people in that process. My first book (Biography of an Empire) was about the role of Christians in Ottoman governance just as national movements dawned in the early nineteenth century. My second book (Turkey: A Past Against History) was about the history of opposition and dissent in the late Ottoman Empire and the transition into Modern Turkey in the early-mid twentieth century.
How did I become interested? I was living in Greece after college and I traveled to Turkey. This was at a time when Greece and Turkey were not friendly, and nobody was admitting that there was anything in common between these two countries. Traveling from Greece to Istanbul (Turkey), and noticing how very similar and how connected they were was a big revelation to me. I wanted to go and learn everything I could about this empire that really fell apart very recently. It was 1922, and this was in the ‘90s, so there were still people alive who had been born in the Ottoman Empire, and yet the memory of it had really been erased. That’s an interesting paradox that I’ve been thinking about throughout my career.
What are some of the recent projects you’ve been working on?
I created a digital collaborative called istanpolis which actually brings together a lot of what I was just talking about. It’s a collaborative project to reconstruct the demography and topography of Istanbul in the 19th century, through the lens of the Greek Orthodox communities that were living there, who have since fallen out of collective memory in both Greece and Turkey for different reasons. We’re doing very granular studies at the neighborhood level, and really trying to reconstruct exactly who was living where and what work they were doing and where they came from. We’re interested in the migration patterns and patterns of interaction between Muslims, Christians and Jews in everyday life. So, it’s really a case study using Istanbul as a microcosm to understand the historical processes that were going on in the 19th century, just as the idea of nationalism came on the scene, but people’s social reality was still very much one of empire.
As a historian, I was wondering what kind of methods you use in your studies, and how that might compare to methods in the other disciplines of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC)?
That’s an interesting question because Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures is an area studies department, so by definition, that’s going to be interdisciplinary. You’re going to find literary - philological approaches, for example, as well as historical, sociological, and linguistic.
In a History Department, we are trained in the tools of the discipline of History – using archival and empirical sources in particular ways to answer questions about change over time. In history, the different divisions are going to include intellectual history, social history, political history, and environmental history. In Middle East Languages and Cultures, it’s going to be: What approach are you taking to the languages and cultures of the region? It’s nice to have both, and to be engaged in both conversations, using both kinds of lenses. Different ways of slicing the problem will help you reach greater complexity and deeper insights.
What languages are offered by the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures? Why do you think it’s important to study languages other than English?
In MELC the key language is Arabic, the predominant language in the region we call the Middle East, spoken by more than 300 million people. We have great instructors, and the top program in Arabic language. And of course we teach the other major languages spoken today in the Middle East: Persian (Farsi), Hebrew, and Turkish–Modern Turkish and sometimes Ottoman Turkish.
The big addition is Modern Greek. It seems, at first, odd to see Modern Greek offered in the Middle East Languages and Cultures Department. Greece is of course part of the European Union and not considered part of the Middle East today. But it was not so long ago that most Greek speakers were living in the Ottoman Empire, and going further back, Greek was spoken in the region we call the Middle East since antiquity. And because we have a new focus on the “Ottoman and Post-Ottoman” geography, students will be interested to learn Greek in the same department where they can also learn Turkish. We really want students to be aware that Modern Greek is now being offered from beginning to advanced levels. We’ve hired a new lecturer–Rexhina Ndoci–to teach all levels of Modern Greek. She’s a sociolinguist who works in Albanian as well as Greek, which is really unique in the framework of Greek studies. She is going to be teaching the full range of Greek language courses, and then she’ll teach an elective about literature and dialect. We want to draw attention to that because I don’t think people expect to go looking in MELC for Modern Greek.
We also teach rarer languages and ancient languages of the Middle East, and we have incredible faculty to teach those. Ethiopic is a new one we’ve been teaching which is incredible, taught by our new colleague Yonatan Binyam. We also teach the forms of Persian that were spoken in Iran before the advent of Islam, such as Middle Persian and Sogdian. We teach Biblical Hebrew, as well as Cuneiform and Akkadian as part of the Assyriology program, which sheds light on Ancient Iraq, the Mesopotamian basin and Levant. Popular with students are also our courses on Hieroglyphics and the Ancient Egyptian language – we really have an incredible array of languages. So we have everything from Arabic, which has multiple sections, to Ethiopic, which might just have a few students taking it, but is really valuable.
In terms of why students should be learning these languages: learning a language is the gateway into a culture and its history. That has always been my experience. There’s nothing like living in a place and learning the language in order to understand the experience of people there, and to understand what is driving history and the dynamics in the region. I think it’s crucial that students learn foreign languages, and I’m really glad that Berkeley is committed to providing those opportunities to students.
As someone who works with multiple languages, I was wondering about your thoughts on translations. What kinds of approaches do you prefer when it comes to translating? Do you usually prefer word-for-word or more creative approaches?
This is something that I’ve always been really interested in. I’m not a professional translator, but I have translated many literary passages and historical writings, especially for my second book, Turkey, A Past Against History. It is a book about the concept of opposition and dissent in Turkish politics and culture, and because there was no opposition party in the Late Ottoman Empire and in Early Republican Turkey, the whole argument rests on the importance of literature and culture in being sort of a surrogate space for opposition that couldn’t survive in the regular political institutional realm. I follow the life and works of one literary figure, and I translate large chunks – sometimes whole short stories and essays – that he wrote. I really love translating, and this is one of the big dilemmas as you’re translating something, especially if it’s something that isn’t just from a different language, but from another historical moment. A lot of the passages I translated in that book are satirical as well. Humor has many layers of meaning, and so you have to be able to grasp how readers would have read that at the moment to be able to capture the meaning of those words. It’s really not word-for-word – it’s really about getting the joke. How do you translate a joke from one language to another? Sometimes it’s pretty difficult. Sometimes you have to tell a completely different joke to get the same punch-line. It’s a fascinating problem.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this article?
I might recommend one of the books by Michael Herzfeld, who’s an anthropologist. He did a lot of his work on Modern Greece. I would recommend Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. I would also recommend The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric - a historical novel about the Balkans that will help you understand the connected experiences of people in the Balkans and the Middle East.
In general, from Middle Eastern Studies, I want to recommend one of the books that inspired me both as a historian and as a Middle East scholar and was one of the reasons I went to graduate school. It’s a book called The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran by Roy Mottahedeh. This is a biography that uses the life of a figure in the Iranian revolution to open up the whole history of Iran. Language, literature and history help us understand both the uniqueness of experience in different times and places and the ways that experience is part of a universal human experience and these books are wonderful exemplars of that.