Erik Blackthorne-O’Barr is a doctoral candidate in the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department. His research focuses on forms of national, cultural and gendered identity in the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on the politics of linguistic belonging in the Ottoman Empire and Persianate world. His dissertation, “Persian Letters: Language, Politics, and Desire in the Late Ottoman Empire,” examines how the reform of the Ottoman Turkish language centered upon a notion of Persianate cultural influence. He is the co-editor of the volume Levantines of the Ottoman World: Communities, Identities, and Cultures, available from Ibn Haldun University Press, and he has published in Kadim Dergisi (2021), the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021, 2022), and Culture, Theory and Critique (2024). His work has been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Columbia Armenian Center, and the Sakip Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies, and from 2022-2023 he was a doctoral fellow at the Koç University ANAMED Institute. Before coming to Columbia, he completed a Master’s degree in Turkish Studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul, and a Bachelor’s degree from the Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations department at the University of Toronto.