Ottoman Subject, Russian Prisoner, Servant of Persia: The Life, Writings, and Personal Archive of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman-Armenian Envoy- Dr Henry Shapiro (Princeton University)

Dr Henry Shapiro is a Polonsky Research Fellow in the Department of History, Princeton University. He is a historian of the Early Modern Near East, with a particular interest in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires.  His research focuses on the place of non-Muslims in the early modern Islamic World.  He works mainly on the Ottoman Empire, with a secondary interest in Safavid Iran. 

Shapiro conducts research based on Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Armenian, and Greek primary sources, and he has written articles in English, Turkish, and Eastern Armenian. Recent publications include, “Falling Out of Love with the Franks: The Life and Writings of an Armenian Catholic Diplomat in the Service of Late Safavid Persia,” Iranian Studies 54 (2021):  573-603; and “The Great Armenian Flight:  Migration and Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Early Modern History 23 (2019):  67-89.  His first book, entitled The Rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire:  From Refugee Crisis to Renaissance, was published with Edinburgh University Press’s series on “Non-Muslim Contributions to Islamic Civilization” in Spring 2022.