Yakup Emre Karaşahan, recipient of the 2024 Kranzberg Fellowship during his pre-recorded reply at the Awards Event in Chile. (Photo SHOT)
For “Prophets of a Righteous Civilization: Re-imagining Technology with an Islamic Mindset, 1870-1950.”
The committee is pleased to award the 2024 Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship to Yakup Emre Karaşahan.
Karaşahan is a graduate student in University of Delaware’s Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture working on a dissertation entitled “Prophets of a Righteous Civilization: Re-Imagining Technology with an Islamic Mindset, 1870–1950.”
Karaşahan proposes a non-schematic, granular approach to technology and religion. Rather than conceiving of technology and religion as abstract categories, he focuses on how Ottoman Islamic scholars thought about specific technologies such as photography and the bicycle, how they used them to think about religion, and how they imagined both modern and future societies shaped by new technologies and yet firmly religious and Islamic rather than secular. Karaşahan will use the Kranzberg Fellowship to examine handwritten texts by religious scholars held by libraries and archives across Turkey.