John Curry (History) has worked as one of a team of translators of the first printed books in Ottoman Turkish, dating from 1732. The Cihannuma, or Cosmographia of Katip Celebi (d. 1657), later combined with the work of the Arab geographer Abu Bakr al-Dimashqi and published by the Hungarian convert Ibrahim Muteferrika, was an encyclopedic compendium of world geography and the state of scientific advances in various parts of the world. It was presented to the elite of the Ottoman Empire and received a wide readership at the time. The work, published by Brill, has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of Ottoman intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Curry benefited immensely from working with some of the finest scholars in his field on this translation, including Gottfried Hagen, Robert Dankoff, Gary Leiser, and Ferenc Csirkes. Curry prepared the section of the work from the original manuscript that ranged from the world's oceans and continents, through Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent. The project was a monumental effort that took a full decade to complete, and has been released with copious original maps and illustrations.
