Prof. Miriam[Miri] Shefer Mossensohn

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History at Tel Aviv University, and since December 2019 I am the Head of the Zvi Yazetz School of Historical Studies.

My research is at the juncture of three fields of historical research: the early modern Ottoman Empire; Islamic medicine, health and illness; and Muslim environmental history. My final goal is to unravel social and cultural realities in the Turkish and Arabic speaking worlds. Grants from the Israel Science Foundation and the German-Israeli Foundation facilitate these research projects. 

My current research explores how medicine was managed, organized, and supervised in the Ottoman Empire of the early modern period. I ask what was considered proper medical care, and examine who was involved in creating and maintaining a medical standard. I trace the evolution of bureaucratic patterns (alongside the rise of the state machinery), and how these do not replace but integrate into the perceptions and practices of those who are not experts, ie the patients and their families, who continue to be an important factor in shaping medical professional consensus. 

In my various administrative positions, I aim at contributing to an enriching and supportive framework for faculty and students to make the most of their intellectual challenges and social experiences at TAU. As the Head of the School, I wish to advance historical research at TAU and in Israel as a whole, and to promote the teaching of history in Israeli academia. I embrace our role as public historians to contribute to a more complex, humane and humanistic understanding of our realities.

I am also a very proud mother of two princesses, Ella and Daphna. I share with them and with my husband my love of kebap meat, Turkish music, and lots and lots of books.

I would love to supervise master and doctoral research students on topics related to my work: Ottoman history, and health, medicine, well-being and environment in Islamic contexts. If you are interested in developing projects within these frameworks, you are most welcome to contact me.

My doctoral students to date are: * Dr. Tsameret Levi-Dafni graduated in 2016 with a PhD on material culture, social networks and political elites in 18^th century Diyarbakir (south-east Anatolia). Tsameret is the Director of the Forum for Contemporary Turkish Studies at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. * Dr. Irena Fliter received her degree in 2017, with a dissertation on Ottoman diplomacy in Central Europe and cultural ties between Ottomans and German-speaking Europeans around 1800. Today Irena is a DFG post-doc fellow at Göttingen University. * In the beginning of 2019 a Ph.D. degree was confered to Dr. Ido Ben-Ami based on his doctoral dissertation on animals and human emotions in the Ottoman urban society in the early modern period. His dissertation won the Best Doctoral Dissertation for 2019 by the Middle East & Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI).

I am currently supervising two doctoral students. Galit Cohen (Archeology, joint guidance with Dr. Hila May and Prof. Yuval Gadot) reconstructs the health profile of the Muslim population in Eretz Israel during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods through archeological and anthropological means. Roy Yerushalmi (History) explores the connection between food, identity and nationalism in the eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Israel. I also supervise (with Prof. Dafna Goldman) the MA thesis of Myriam Darmoni Charbit (Environmental Studies) on the roles of Islamic values ​​and traditions in effective environmental education in the Arab sector in Israel. Outside TAU, I am on the doctoral committee accompanying Mrs. Anabella Esperanza (the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, HUJ) who writes about the religious and medical practices of Jewish Ladino speaking women in the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican periods.

As a scholar of Ottoman science and medicine, I have published Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions 1500-1700 (State University of New York Press, 2009). The Turkish edition was published by Kitap in Istanbul in 2014. In another book I explain how Ottomans "did" science: Science among the Ottomans: The Cultural Creation and Exchange of Knowledge (the University of Texas Press, 2015). I am pleased that this book too was translated into Turkish (Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2018), and am especially gratified there is an Arabic edition, published in Beirut and Algiers. 

Alongside these academic publishing projects, I also address the general Israeli audience. Islam: A Brief Introduction (Tel Aviv University, The Publishing House and Mapa Publishing House, 2006) sketches the 1400-plus years of Islamic religious history for Hebrew readers. Another book in Hebrew, Knowledge, Science and Technology in the Ottoman Empire was written for the Open University course "The Ottoman Empire: Selected Topics" (2015). In the spring of 2013, a series of lectures on medicine, health and death in Muslim societies was boradcasted on "Broadcast University" of the Israeli Army Radio (Galei Tzahal). 

In recent years I have started to be active academically in digital media. I recently completed the development of "Arab-Islamic History: From Tribes to Empire," a MOOC (a Massive Open Online Course) on the history of the Middle East, 7th - 15th centuries. I teamed with TAU Online – Learning Innovation Center to create these contents for the edX platform (Harvard and MIT). The process of development was a fascinating process of integrating content and innovative teaching forms. Teaching a course to thousands of people worldwide (we are almost 25,000 people...) is an exciting experience; The interaction with hundreds of learners from all over the Muslim world in especially enriching and contributes to my classes at TAU.