About

I am a research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut of the Max Weber Foundation. I completed my Ph.D. with a thesis titled “To Whom Belong the Streets? Property, Propriety, and Appropriation: The Production of Public Space in Late Ottoman Damascus, 1875-1914.” in 2014 at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. My current research project under the working title “women in the street” aims at establishing a genealogy of urban food riots in the Eastern Mediterranean between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. In addition to the social and spatial history of late Ottoman cities, I am interested in digital humanities and the socio-linguistics of early Arabic newspapers. This resulted in the online publication of a chronology of nineteenth century Arabic periodicals and known holdings (Project Jarāʾid’s first iteration) and a contribution to the recent collection of essays titled “Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies” (ed. Elias Muhanna, 2016). I currently work on open, collaborative and scholarly digital editions of early Arabic periodicals such as Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas and ʿAbd al-Qādir Iskandarānī’s al-Ḥaqāʾiq in the framework of my research project “Open Arabic Periodical Editions” (OpenArabicPE). I occasionally blog at tillgrallert.github.io.