Dr Christopher Markiewicz

• PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, University of Chicago
• MA in Middle Eastern Studies, University of Chicago
• BA in History, University of Chicago
• Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education, University of Birmingham

I studied history as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. One year after graduating, I took up studying Arabic in Lebanon and Egypt before returning to Chicago for a master’s in Middle Eastern Studies. I stayed on for a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. In the course of these studies, I spent one year studying at Bilkent University in Ankara and another year conducting research in Istanbul. Immediately before coming to Birmingham, I spent two years as a research fellow at Exeter College, Oxford. In 2016, my doctoral dissertation was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association of North America. 

Undergraduate teaching

• Practicing History
• Living in the Medieval World, 1050-1500
• The Early Modern World
• Cities of the Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean: Monuments and Memories
• After the Mongols: Political Authority in Islam, 1200-1600
• Islamicate Empires: The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals in the Early Modern World

Postgraduate teaching

• Global Histories: Comparisons and Connections
• Introduction to Early Modern History

I am happy to discuss supervising postgraduate research in all aspects of Ottoman history, as well as the political and intellectual history of Islamic lands after the arrival of the Mongols (thirteenth-seventeenth centuries).

Find out more - our PhD Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I am currently working on a book project that focuses on an examination of the life and work of Idris Bidlisi, visionary historian of the Ottoman dynasty, influential adviser to sultans, and principal architect of the Ottoman incorporation of Kurdistan in the 1510s. Through examination of Bidlisi, the book examines the impact of itinerant scholars and secretaries upon the development and adaptation of new ideas on kingship among Muslim courts across large parts of Asia in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.