Nir Shafir

Nir Shafir is a Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in early modern Ottoman Empire history. His research focuses on communication, religion, science, and technology, with a particular interest in how material culture shaped intellectual and scientific life in the Middle East between 1300-1800. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Middle Eastern history, the history of science, and historical approaches to disinformation.

Shafir earned his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2016. His first book, The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2024), examines the role of pamphlets in Ottoman socio-religious debates. Current projects include a social history of Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire and an investigation into antiquarianism in the early modern Middle East.

He contributes to the Ottoman History Podcast as an editorial board member and served as its editor in 2018. His research spans topics such as manuscript culture, intellectual networks, and the intersection of religion and science. Key publications address Ottoman antiquarianism, language dynamics, and the socio-economic foundations of scholarship.

Shafir’s work combines archival rigor with innovative digital methods, exploring how digitization transforms access to early modern Islamic manuscripts. His analyses highlight the Ottoman Empire’s complex interactions with global intellectual currents and its role in shaping pre-modern and modern cultural landscapes.