- Name:
- Dr. Michael Erdman
- Position:
- Head, Middle East and Central Asia Collections, British Library
- TIMA Role:
- Individual Member
- Address:
- 96 Euston Road
NW1 2DB
London
United Kingdom - Tel:
- +442074127648
- Fax:
- Email:
- michael.erdman@bl.uk
- Website:
- bl.academia.edu/MichaelErdman
- Expertise:
- As the Head of Middle East and Central Asia Collections at the British Library, I have overall responsibility for all manuscript holdings in Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Chagatai, Coptic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Syriac. I formerly worked as the Curator of Turkish and Turkic Collections, dealing the Library's holdings of Ottoman Turkish, Azerbaijani, Chagatai, and Kurdish textual sources. My professional interest relates to the categorizing, cataloguing, and care of such valuable historical works. I have written about custodianship of manuscript items within the British Library's holdings, and the challenges relating to discoverability and access of such materials. My efforts have allowed me to explore post-1980 acquisitions, and the new horizons that they create in the field of manuscript illumination and illustration in the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia. On a scholarly level, my interest in Turkic and Kurdish manuscript cultures relates both to their linguistic structures and their intellectual content. I have written about idiosyncratic orthographies in Ottoman Turkish manuscripts, and about dialect forms in Eastern Turkic works. I am particularly interested in the identification of non-dominant linguistic phenomena in Turkic manuscripts, and the means of accounting for linguis1c plurality in pre-20th century sources. Most recently, I have focused on the Library's collection of unpublished works by Enderunlu Fazıl Bey, exploring the later apparitions of the mahallîleşme school and of the şehrengîz genre, while also ensuring comprehensive cataloguing of our Christian Arabic, Coptic, Karshuni and Syriac materials.
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