Walter G. Andrews films on Turkey, 1986

Walter G. Andrews (1939-2020) was Research Professor Emeritus of Turkish and Ottoman Studies at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Near Eastern Studies (1970). At this time, Andrews started his position as the first Turkish and Ottoman Studies professor of the UW’s newly established Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization (NELC), having been invited to this position by the founder of the department, Prof. Farhat Ziadeh, on Professor Jere Bacharach’s recommendation.

With his first two monographs, An Introduction to Ottoman Poetry (1976) and Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry (1985), and many articles in major journals, Andrews reintroduced Ottoman Turkish poetry into the larger fields of literature and history. These works were the first major English language commentaries on Ottoman literary tradition published in more than 60 years.

His collaborations with Prof. Mehmet Kalpakli (Bilkent University, Turkey) culminated in an original anthology, Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology, (with Najaat Black, 1995, 2006) and a major investigation on literary discourses and their role in gender system and sex, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (2005). Drawing on major philological work in Ottoman Studies, he expanded the horizons of several generations of students in Ottoman Studies by engaging with theoretical approaches to literature. He took part in a series of conferences on emotions, and his most recent article involved neuro-scientific approaches to literature.

From the late 1980s onward, Andrews contributed to the nascent field of Digital Humanities. His Ottoman Divans Project later evolved into Ottoman Textual Archive Project (OTAP) in collaboration with Dr. Stacy Waters, which later evolved into Newbook Digital Texts with Dr. Sarah Ketchley and Dr. Mary Childs. In 2017, he launched Many Poems of Baki Project with a conference organized at the University of Washington in collaboration with many scholars in the field of Ottoman Studies, including Dr. Sarah Ketchley and Dr. Gulsah Taskin (Boğaziçi University, Turkey). Andrews developed new digital methodologies for collaborative projects that involve faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, addressing issues of textual data production, sustainability, management and user experience.

Source: https://melc.washington.edu/news/2020/06/02/walter-g-andrews-1939-2020 , accessed November 2023