Christopher Markiewicz is an associate research professor in Ottoman and Islamic Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures, and an affiliate member of the Department of History. His research focuses on the political, social, and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Before coming to Ghent in 2023, he was an associate professor in History at the University of Birmingham and junior research fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Christopher Markiewicz completed his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations in 2015, where his dissertation was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award from the Middle East Studies Association of North America (2016).
His past work explored how ideas about history and the nature of kingship in the Ottoman Empire were connected with wider intellectual, cultural, and religious currents across the Islamic world in the early modern period. These interests resulted in the publication of his first book, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He has also published on aspects of diplomatic history, the circulation of intellectuals and ideas, and historical writing in Islamic lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Christopher Markiewicz is the principal investigator of an ERC Starting Grant, 'Islamic Endowments (Waqf) and State Formation in the Ottoman Empire (1450-1650)', a project which examines the role of pious endowment in the development of the Ottoman state within the the wider context of the transition in Islamic lands from a long period of political fragmentation to imperial consolidation in the early modern period. He is the series editor of The Ottoman Empire and the World (I.B Tauris in collaboration with the British Institute at Ankara), and a trustee of the EJW Gibb Memorial Trust. In 2023, Christopher Markiewicz was elected a member of the Young Academy of Europe.
