B. Harun Küçük received his BA in Liberal Arts from St. John's College and an MA in History at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. He completed his doctoral work on History and Science Studies at University of California, San Diego (2012). Prior to joining Penn's Department of History and Sociology of Science, he was a lecturer at Sabancı, Şehir and Boğaziçi Universities in Istanbul and held pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
His first book, Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732 (Pittsburgh, 2019) is a history of vernacular science in the Ottoman Empire. The book investigates the cosmopolitanism, the republicanism and the intellectual self-reliance of Ottoman naturalists within the broader context of commerce, warfare, religious conversion and political upheaval in early modern Istanbul. Currently, he is writing a book about the long-term relationship between science and monetary capital. He is also part of the ERC-funded project “Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities.” Together with Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, he is co-editing a primary source reader on Ottoman science.
Küçük's research interests include science and religion, the Enlightenment and the movement of knowledge in the early modern period.
Publications:
Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)
"Translating Arabic into Turkish in the Seventeenth Century;" Isis, 109/1 (2018). Early Modern Ottoman Science: A New Materialist Framework." Journal of Early Modern History 21 407-419 (2017): "The Copernican Rhetoric of Ibrahim Muteferrika." in Sietske Fransen. Niall Hodson and Karl Enenkel eds. Translating Early Modern Science. Leiden: Brill, 258-285 (2017); "New Medicine and the Hikmet-i Tabiyye Problematic in Eighteenth Century Istanbul." in Tzvi Langermann and Robert Morrison, eds. Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, pp. 222-242 (2016). "Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Eighteenth Century: Esad of Ionnina and Greek Aristotelianism at the Ottoman Court." Journal of Ottoman Studies 41: 125-159. (2013).
“Medical Translations and the Hikmet-i Tabiyye Problematic in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” in Tzvi Langermann and Robert Morrison, eds. Texts in Transit in the Pre-Modern Eastern Mediterranean. Pennsylvania State University Press.
2013 “Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Eighteenth Century: Esad of Ioannina and Greek Aristotelianism at the Ottoman Court,” Journal of Ottoman Studies, 41, 2013: 125-159.
2011 “Islam, Christianity and the Conflict Thesis,” in Geoffrey Cantor, Thomas Dixon and Stephen Pumfrey, eds. Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; pp. 111-130.