Postdocs

Name: Dr. Riley Linebaugh

Title:  “‘Caesar’s Wives’: Secretaries, Secrecy and Violence in the British Empire”

In 1962, permanent secretary of the British colonial ministry of internal security and defence in Kenya, Geoffrey James Ellerton, praised his ministry’s efforts to conceal public records into a secret registry lest they “embarrass” the British government and their agents, especially with regards to the ‘Emergency’. Eventually, such efforts resulted in the mass displacement of an estimated 20,000 files from not just Kenya but 36 other colonial dependencies to London where they remained, secretly, for decades. In a letter to the Governor’s Office, he boasted, “we like to think that in these matters we are as Caesar’s wife,” i.e., above suspicion. [1] Nameless, essential, unseen: Caesar’s wife is evoked as a handmaid of the British Empire, responsible for disappearing any evidence of its misdeeds in order to preserve a guise of integrity. The phrase, which raises themes of loyalty, secrecy, servitude, and power, is more than metaphor. By the end of 1961, of the 34 members of Kenya’s colonial service with security clearance to handle top-secret records, 15 were women, most of whom worked as personal secretaries to male officers. [2]

The existence and significance of female secretaries in the British Empire have been largely neglected in scholarship, as is often the case with secretarial work, which is both integral and oft overlooked. Moreover, however subordinated white female secretaries are in documents preserved by institutional archives, female colonial and racialized subjects are even more marginally represented in the preserved record. This marginal status within official archives illustrates a hierarchy of preserved perspectives rather than the non-activity of female colonial subjects, present in the “contact zones” of empire. This project seeks to reconstruct the composite life stories of 5-7 women working in different areas of the British empire in the 19th and 20th centuries with a focus on their practices of secret-keeping in connection with violence through clerical, secretarial, and, where possible, intelligence work.

[1] UK National Archives, FCO 141/6958, “Security of Official Correspondence,” Ministry of Defence: Letter from Ellerton to Hennings, 17 April 1962.

[2] UK National Archives, FCO 141/6969, “Kenya: Security of Documents,” Circular from Thomas Neil, “Security – List of Officers Authorised to see ‘Watch’ Material,” 13 December 1961.

Name: Dr. Zeynep Turkyilmaz

Title : The Onerous Odyssey of Hovannes Avetaranian: A Cosmopolite’s struggle for emancipation, agency and equality

Starting date: 01.10.2021

Project Description: My RTG project investigates the life of a convert, Mehmet Şükrü who was born to a Muslim family in a small village in the eastern territories of the Ottoman Empire in 1861, adopted the name Hovannes Avetaranian and died as a devoted Protestant missionary in Wiesbaden Germany in 1919. Tracing  Avetaranian’s exceptional journey, his views on the world, his curiosity and soul-searching, self-proselytization and conversion, his missionary life from the Kashgar Mountains in China to Potsdam in Germany, I hope to uncover a trajectory of critical, dissenting and emancipatory entanglements of the local population in the Ottoman countryside with the modern-world -in-the-making. In the end however, Avetaranian’s struggle could not redesign the religio-political trajectory of his peoples as he had imagined and hoped, nor it could change the metanarrative about them within or outside of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, drawing on multi-sited archival work and critical literature on Ottoman empire, colonialism, cosmopolitanism, and religious/conversion studies, I propose to study his struggles as a radical intervention and an unwavering reminder of the complex and divergent possibilities of the past, and of enclaves of alternative worldings.