Kamil Pasha

 I am an author and scholar, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, specializing in contemporary Turkish culture, politics and society. I am also the author of two novels in the Kamil Pasha series: The Sultan’s Seal and The Abyssinian Proof. For more information about my books and some background history, check out my website: www.jennywhite.net

This blog is meant to contain (and scatter) the confetti of my thoughts as I spend the year 2008 in Istanbul on a research grant. I’ll be looking into political issues, nationalism and Islam in particular as these are developing in Turkey right now, but also gathering impressions and ideas for my Kamil Pasha fiction series set in 1880s Istanbul. This is a city where the past is right there beneath your nose as you walk about the streets. I see things now with the eyes of my main character Kamil Pasha, a prosecutor/magistrate in the nineteenth century secular Ottoman court of Beyoglu, the foreigners’ section of Istanbul. He went to school here, grew up here, worked and loved here (and in my mind and that of my readers still does). On this blog, together we will walk where Kamil Pasha walked, see what he saw. Old Turkey and new, my impressions and thoughts. In addition to Kamil Pasha’s historical eye, I’ll try to give my own historical reflections as someone who has been coming to – and often living in — Turkey since the mid-1970s. A kaleidoscope, confetti, colorful impressions, but I hope not superficial.