Book Talk | Murat Yildiz | The Ottoman World of Sports

The Moynihan Institute’s, Middle Eastern Studies Program presents Murat C. Yildiz from Skidmore College.

How do we write a history of urban centers in the late Ottoman Empire in which we study Muslims, Jews and Christians through a single frame? Focusing on his new book The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026), historian Murat C. Yıldız explores the creation of a shared sports culture among Turks, Armenians, Greeks and Jews at the end of empire in the political center of the Ottoman Empire.

The talk reconsiders the history of late imperial Istanbul and its lived urban space through a focus on the activities, spaces and discourses of what Ottoman-Turkish speakers referred to as “the Ottoman world of sports.” Yıldız examines how gymnasts, footballers, weightlifters, runners, coaches, teachers, journalists and fans reconfigured communal boundaries and pursued a civic project that blended fitness, gender, class, morality and community.

Murat C. Yıldız is associate professor of history at Skidmore College. His book The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026) tells the story of the role played by Muslim, Christian and Jewish sports aficionados in the making of a shared sports culture in Istanbul during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He's an assistant editor of the Arab Studies Journal and an editorial board member of the International Journal of the History of Sport.