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Vera Costantini
Armenian, Caucasian, Mongolian and Turkish studies

What do you teach at Ca’ Foscari? What are your main research interests? 
At Ca' Foscari I teach Turkish Language, Ottoman Palaeography, History of the Ottoman Empire, History of Republican Turkey, Economics History of Mediterranean. My main interests lie in the economic and social history of Venetian-Ottoman Mediterranean in the modern age, but I have also occasionally ventured into contemporary Italian-Ottoman history in the late nineteenth century. My academic career suffers from the inadequacy of the disciplinary categories of Italian Oriental studies. Framed in a linguistic field, I mainly teach and study historical disciplines, which belong to other fields than my own. This and other more strictly ideological factors are the causes of my late academic progression: from youngest researcher in Italy (2004) to oldest adjunct lecturer (2020).

What led you to pursue a research career? What are you most passionate about in your field of study? 
My father was a full professor of Economics History and was mainly concerned with the maritime history of the Republic of Venice. When I was still a child, I used to go with him to the "Gino Luzzatto" Institute of Economics History, on the fourth floor of what is now the main administrative building of our university, and to the State Archives in Venice. I had a pen and paper for drawing, but the day came when my father let me read my first manuscript. It was about Giustina Renier Michiel, a patrician lady who gave her name to the primary school I attended. Since then, I have never left archives and libraries: perhaps because of this early encounter with historical research, it is precisely that peculiar empathy that the manuscript creates with its reader, the feeling that makes me feel at home. I felt this again at the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul, where I conducted research for four years, and I find it again every semester when I teach Ottoman Palaeography to students of Turkish studies at Ca' Foscari. I have had the good fortune to meet some great teachers in my life: Ruggiero Romano, who advised me to begin studying Turkish and Ottoman, but also Alberto Tenenti, Ugo Tucci, and of course Mehmet Genç, Marcello Carmagnani, İlber Ortaylı, Sinan Kuneralp and many other prominent intellectuals who have made a significant contribution to my education and, more generally, to world historiographic culture.

What does teaching at the university mean to you?
Teaching at university means trusting that the improvement of our society will come from higher education and the advancement of culture and science.

You work in a department dealing with non-European worlds: what does working on cultural diversity mean to you in an increasingly interconnected world?
I believe that Venetian Orientalism has not solved - or even, if I may be frank, tackled - the great challenge facing human sciences, including, of course, economics. This challenge is not dealing with distant worlds out of passion for the exotic or a taste for antiques... but rather adopting the perspective of others, in this case non-European, in order to verify our own history (Venetian, Italian, European, Atlantic...). Unfortunately, this is a fairly widespread tendency. During the celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of the end of the Great War, among the French-German displays of affection, I was struck by the fact that no one mentioned that the Ottoman Empire, fighting on four different fronts, suffered more human losses than all the other European countries put together. The "interconnected world" referred to seems to me to bear little resemblance to the International of Culture. Rather, it often looks to me like a network of large monopolies, accompanied by a dangerous, unstoppable erosion of democratic life in individual countries. Historiography, human sciences and with them Oriental studies have not been able to curb this erosion, which I believe could only have come out of a radical re-contextualisation of the concept of otherness, of which the history of the "Turks" still surprisingly holds the record.

Last update: 27/02/2024