Autor: Gerald MacLean

Gerald MacLean is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter in the UK, co-director of Exeter Turkish Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society of London. A scholar of early-modern English literature and its historical contexts, since 1993 he has devoted his research to the many works published in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describing the Ottoman Empire, and to charting the nature and range of East-West encounters during the early modern period. His books, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (2007), and The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (2004) have both appeared in Turkish translation. He is also editor of Re-Orienting the Renaissance (2005), and Writing Turkey: Explorations in Turkish History, Politics and Cultural Identity (2006). He is a founding member of The Evliya Çelebi Way Project, an international group of scholars and equestrians who, in 2009, travelled across western Anatolia on horseback following the route of the great Ottoman travel writer and historian. This project of historical re-enactment has been supported by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and has led to UNESCO naming 2011 the Year of Evliya Çelebi.