Rosemary Maxton

I am a historian of Christianity in the early modern Ottoman Empire, specifically within the eastern provinces. My recently submitted doctoral thesis (Oxford University, 2024) investigated Catholic conversion among Syriac and Armenian Christians in Mardin (current-day southeast Turkey) between 1662-1783, relying on a corpus of locally produced manuscripts in Arabic and Syriac. It also considered the impact of Ottoman Christian scholarship in the early twentieth century on historical narratives of Catholicism in the region. Prior to my PhD, I worked as a Research Assistant on the ERC project ‘Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World’ at Oxford University, and as an Arabic instructor at the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews.

Research Interests

My research centres on issues of religious identity, community formation and local history. Building on the modern context to my doctoral research, I am currently focussing on historical works written by Syriac Catholic scholars in the early twentieth century, and how these shed light on specific community identities in late Ottoman intellectual culture and society.