Stanford J. Shaw

Biography

Stanford J. Shaw was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on May 5, 1930. He attended Stanford University, where he majored in British History under the direction of Professor Carl Brand, with a minor in Near Eastern History, under the direction of Professor Wayne Vucinich. He received his B.A.at Stanford in 1951 and M.A. in 1952, with a thesis on “The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Party from 1920 until 1938” based on research in the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He then studied Middle Eastern history along with Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a Graduate Student at Princeton University starting in 1952, receiving his M.A. in 1955. Shaw subsequently went to England to study with Bernard Lewis and Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and with Professor Hamilton A.R. Gibb at Oxford University. Following this, he traveled to Egypt to study with Shafiq Ghorbal and Adolph Grohmann at the University of Cairo and Shaikh Sayyid at the Azhar University, also doing research in the Ottoman archives of Egypt at the Citadel in Cairo for his Princeton Ph.D. dissertation concerning Ottoman rule in Egypt. In 1956-7 he studied at the University of Istanbul with Professors Omer Lutfi Barkan, Mukrimin Halil Inanc, Halil Sahillioglu, and Zeki Velidi Togan, also completing research on his dissertation in the Ottoman archives of Istanbul and in the Topkapi Sarayi archives. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1958 from Princeton University with a dissertation entitled “The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517-1798,” prepared under the direction of Professor Lewis Thomas and Professor Hamilton A.R. Gibb, which was published by the Princeton University Press in 1962. Stanford Shaw served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Turkish Language and History, with tenure, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and in the Department of History at Harvard University from 1958 until 1968, and as Professor of Turkish history at UCLA from 1968 until his retirement in 1992. Afterwards he was recalled to teach Turkish history at UCLA between 1992 and 1997 before going to Bilkent University as Professor of Ottoman and Turkish History starting in 1999.

Stanford Shaw was founder and first editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, published by the Cambridge University Press for the Middle East Studies Association, from 1970 until 1980. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including (with his wife Ezel Kural Shaw) History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (2 volumes, Cambridge University Press 1976-1977), Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III (Harvard University Press), The Budget of Ottoman Egypt (Mouton and Co. The Hague), Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press),Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard University Press), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic(Macmillan, London, and New York University Press, 1991), Turkey and the Holocaust (Macmillan, London and New York University Press, 1992), The Turkish War of National Liberation, 1918-1923 (Turkish Historical Society, 3 volumes, 1999), andStudies in Ottoman and Turkish history (Analecta Isisiana, 2000).

He was an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society (Ankara), recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard University and the Bogazici University (Istanbul), and a member of the Middle East Studies Association, the American Historical Society, and the Tarih Vakfi (Istanbul). He also received a Medal of Honor (Liyakat Madalyasi) from the President of Turkey and medals for lifetime achievement from the Turkish-American Association and from the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul.

Professor Shaw received two major research awards from the United States National Endowment from the Humanities as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hayes Committee.

Professor Shaw passed away on December 16, 2006.