Claremont McKenna College Professor Awarded M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize

Heather Ferguson, associate professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, has been awarded the prestigious Köprülü Book Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses.

The prize is given to "the most outstanding book" in the field of Ottoman and Turkish studies published in the previous year.

"The Ottoman archive in Ferguson's book emerges not just as a repository of the past, but a means of forging the present of discursive power, whether in the seventeenth or the twenty-first century," wrote Dr. Benjamin Fortna, the chair of this year's book prize committee. Ferguson was honored at the recent Middle East Studies Conference reception in New Orleans.

Ferguson, a scholar and professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern History, was also recently awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She will use the funding to research her new book on archival ventures and last acts of ruling sovereigns of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.