Historian of the Ottoman Empire, Persianate World and modern Iran.
Currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, Princeton University, 2025-2028. Previous Columbia, Sabancı, Toronto.
See my Academia.edu page here for samples of my published work.
Blackthorne-O’Barr’s work has been published in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Kadim, and Culture, Theory & Critique, as well as in the edited volumes Spectacle, Entertainment, and Recreation in the Modernizing Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey (2023) and Performing Resilience: Intersectionality and Agonistic Solidarity for Another Turkey (forthcoming, 2026). Together with Burhan Çaglar of Sakarya University, he has published the co-edited volume Levantines of the Ottoman World: Communities, Identities, and Cultures with Ibn Haldun University Press, 2023.
His upcoming monograph, “Persian Letters: Language, Politics, and Desire in the Late Ottoman Empire,” traces how the literary and aesthetic debates surrounding the reform of the Ottoman Turkish language in the late nineteenth century were centered upon competing notions of Persianate influence, and the crucial role expatriate Iranians played in the articulation of Turkish literary modernity.