Heather Ferguson Wins the Köprülü Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association

Heather Ferguson, associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College in California, has been awarded the prestigious Köprülü Book Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association at the recent Middle East Studies Conference reception in New Orleans. The prize is given to “the most outstanding book” in the field of Ottoman and Turkish studies published in the previous year.

Dr. Ferguson is being honored for her book The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses (Stanford University Press, 2018). Benjamin Fortna, the chair of this year’s book prize committee, stated that “the Ottoman archive in Ferguson’s book emerges not just as a repository of the past, but a means of forging the present of discursive power, whether in the seventeenth or the twenty-first century.”

Dr. Ferguson recently was awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She will use the funding to research her new book on archival ventures and the last acts of ruling sovereigns of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires.

A member of the Claremont McKenna faculty since 2011, Dr. Ferguson was promoted to associate professor in 2017. She is a summa cum laude graduate of La Sierra University in Riverside, California, where she majored in religion and literature. Dr. Ferguson holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley