Dr. Barbara Henning

Biography

Barbara Henning has been a professor of Turkology at the University of Hamburg since October 2024. Previously, she worked as an assistant professor for the history of Islam in the Eastern Mediterranean at the Historical Seminar of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She studied Islamic studies, Arabistics, and ethnology (B.A.) as well as Turkology (M.A.) in Halle, Bamberg, and Paris, focusing on Ottoman history in the 19th century. Henning was a scholar in the doctoral program of the Graduate School Near Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle during 2012/13 and earned her PhD in 2016 with a study on the history of the Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani family. After her graduation, she moved to Berlin, where she worked as an advisor for international literature and translation funding at the German Foreign Office. Between 2018 and 2020, she contributed to a postdoctoral project on border semantics and concepts of social demarcation in the Ottoman context as part of the DFG priority program Transottomanica. Her research interests include Ottoman-Kurdish history, the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, imperial elites, identity and memory politics, autobiographical research, and the history of knowledge and concepts. Currently, she examines aspects of social differentiation and processes of demarcation in the Ottoman context, particularly regarding the descendants of the Prophet, and is interested in late and post-Ottoman educational history with a focus on Northern Iraq.

Research Interests

Experience