Abstract In the wake of Israeli Black Panther activism in the mid-1970s, the Arab League invited Mizrahi (Afro-Asian) Jews, especially those in Israel, to return to their homeland. Some Israelis used the invitation as an opportunity to highlight the extent of anti-Mizra...

Abstract The Ottoman Empire introduced the muhtar system in Istanbul in 1829, appointing lay headmen, called muhtar, to the lowest levels of urban administration: Muslim neighborhoods; Orthodox, Armenian, and Catholic parishes; and Jewish congregations. This reform resu...

This roundtable on women and crime was inspired by a discussion at a CUNY Dissections Seminar in April 2021, where Gülhan Balsoy presented her work in progress on Ottoman crime fiction in the early 20th century. The focus of her paper was a popular murder mystery series...

Depiction of Bertrande, the wife of Martin Guerre, by Natalie Zemon Davis in her famous book The Return of Martin Guerre has been revolutionary in its attempt to recover the criminal agency of women in historical writing. Davis challenged the representation of women as ...

For a long time, women's crime has been quite a no-go area for feminist thinkers. With the lesser frequency of female crime seemingly encouraging quantitative-minded criminologists to dismiss a gendered approach as altogether irrelevant, theories of crime, in fact, have...

Murderesses are not among the stock characters of Ottoman prose stories, but they give us a rare opportunity to discuss how being a woman and committing a crime is represented in literary fiction. They also give us the opportunity to discuss how these stories might have...

In 1914, a Turkish novella depicting a young woman pressing a dagger to the throat of a bearded old man on its cover, with the title Bloody Fairy (Kanlı Peri), appeared for sale on bookshelves in the capital of the Ottoman Empire (Fig. 1). This relatively small book of ...

Modern carcerality in Iran, with its attendant systems of surveillance, policing, and mass imprisonment, was a gendered project from the outset. In turn, the new modern prisons of the Pahlavi era (1925–79) provoked gendered anxieties about seemingly rising rates of fema...