Baki Tezcan is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis; he is the author of The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, and tens of articles on Islam, modern Turkish historiography, and Ottoman history and historiography, the last one of which, “The Disenchantment of Sufism, the Rationalization of Sunni Islam, and Early Modernity,” is soon to appear in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. In 2011-12 he was a visiting scholar at Istanbul Şehir University, which has recently been closed down by President Erdoğan, and last summer, he stood trial in Istanbul as an academic for peace.
