Caleb Shelburne is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. His dissertation, "Knowing Ottomans: Nineteenth-Century Social Sciences in and about the Ottoman Empire" explores social scientific knowledge production about the Ottoman Empire, bringing together European orientalists and their Ottoman interlocutors to study the emergence, spread, and ramifications of fields like anthropology, history, and sociology. Drawing on methods and scholarship in the history of social science, the history of knowledge transfer, Ottoman history, and other related fields, it shows how the scientific study of an "Ottoman" identity - or its absence - laid the foundations for modern understandings of the Middle East in the specific political context of Ottoman imperial decline.
Caleb is also conducting research on the trade of medicinal leeches in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, a project that builds on his interest in non-Western knowledge production but also brings in themes and methods from the history of medicine, environmental history, and economics. His previous research has considered such varied topics as slavery, transportation technology, and travel writing.
He holds a B.A. in the History of Literature from Harvard College and an M.Phil. in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge.