This paper focuses on the conference theme of "Gender Roles, Sexual Identity and Family Dynamics" by examining the travels of Lady Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, a Circassian subject of Shah 'Abbas I who married the first "Persian" ambassador to England, the interloper Robert Sherley, accompanying him on his several journeys from Safavid Iran to England during the early seventeenth century. Robert, during his residence in Iran from 1599 to 1608, had advised the Shah on military matters and gained a mastery of the Persian language. While he changed religions, it was from English Protestantism to Roman Catholicism. Teresa hailed from a Circassian background, with possible connections through an aunt to the household of Shah 'Abbas. The Circassians, situated around the Black Sea region, were traditionally Muslim, although Teresa may have been from an Orthodox Christian background. Representing the confessional complexities of the Safavid empire, upon marrying Robert around 1607 she aligned herself with the Roman Catholicism of the Carmelite missionaries, thus immersing herself in the opposing struggles of post-Reformation Western Europe. She accompanied Robert on his several embassies to Europe from 1608 to 1627, being incorporated into English culture through a spate of treatises, stage plays, and possibly even the first prose romance by an English woman. Teresa and Robert were also portrayed in a pair of culturally hybrid portraits painted in 1622 by Anthony Van Dyck while they sojourned in Rome. Robert famously sported a turban, on which he was reputed to wear a cross on occasion; Teresa wore a loose gown and headdress that blended her Persian background with her new Western European setting. Upon their return to the Savafid empire, Robert died suddenly in 1628, with the Carmelite chronicles recording Teresa's resistance to Persian men's pressure for her to "reconvert" after her English husband's death. She bravely guarded his remains, and ultimately sought the means to convey them to Rome, where she lived for fifty years before being buried beside him. Her epitaph describes her as an "Amazon," which references her Circassian background and her courageous character, but which also suggests her challenges to patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality. In examining Teresa's negotiations of multiple subject positions in cultural contexts that cut across traditional designations of "east" and "west," this paper thus seeks to theorize female agency across competing religious affiliations that nevertheless shared common codes for gendered behavior.

The Romani population in Turkey is approximately two million and the Roma have been residing in this country since the eleventh century. However, the mobilization of the Turkish Roma has been very weak, and the Roma have started to get mobilized only for a couple of years. This paper thus analyzes the intrinsic reasons of the weakness of the Turkish Romani mobilization, which is a topic overlooked by scholars. In order to discern the factors that foster and hinder the Romani mobilization in Turkey, this paper examines the domestic political opportunity structure and the supranational political opportunity structure, namely the EU. Moreover, the framing of the Romani leaders of the main Romani associations in Turkey is examined. This paper focuses on Turkey and relies on in-depth interviews conducted with five Romani leaders and four experts in Edirne, Izmir, Istanbul and Budapest (where the European Roma Rights Center is located) in 2009. It is concluded that the Turkish legislation on minorities is the main threat hindering this mobilization: The Roma are not recognized as minorities and the legislature on the Roma is very discriminatory which leaves little room for their mobilization. On the other hand, forced evictions through urban renovation projects have appeared as an opportunity. Urban renovation projects conducted in major Romani neighborhoods have attracted significant attention from the media and civil society organizations, and led to a sense of solidarity and collective action among the Roma. This paper also argues that the EU acts as both an opportunity and threat to the Turkish Romani mobilization. Specifically, the monitoring mechanism of the EU through its Regular Progress Reports, changes undergone in the legislation in the context of the EU accession reforms, the extension of public discussion and the EU funding have facilitated the Romani mobilization. However, the EU inability to discern the uniqueness of the Roma in Turkey and its policy and project recommendations which have hardly suited the Turkish Romani needs, dependency on the EU funding hence the EU`s normative agenda, and the exclusion of the Romani experts in the EU projects have constituted threat to the Romani mobilization. Based on the framings of the leaders, this paper concludes that lack of education, solidarity and experience; prejudices; financial problems; organizational fragmentation; clashes in framings and the fact that the Roma identify themselves primarily as Turk constitute the main factors explaining the weakness of the Turkish Romani mobilization.

Colonel Sadik Bey (el-Mueyyed) composed a travelogue, The Journey of an Ottoman Officer in the Great African Sahara (Bir Osmanli Zabitinin Afrika Sahra-yi Kebiri'nde Seyahati), based largely on his notes apparently taken en route, after completing his mission of conveying the presents of Sultan Abdulhamid II to the shaikh of the Sunusi order, Muhammed el-Mehdi el-Sunusi (1845-1902), resident in the sufi monastery in the town of Koufra (southeastern Libya today) in the year of 1895. The travelogue was published first in the popular scientific-literary journal Servet-i Funun in twenty seven parts in 1897-98 and also in 1898 as a book. My paper analyses the narrative content and the visual components of the travelogue as sources of the dynamics of Ottoman imperialism at the time of the "Scramble for Africa". Paying attention to the various portrayals of different groups of "locals", the author's use of ethnographic tropes, his ideas about the economic potential of the province, and the relative importance of the depiction of the Ottoman military presence there, the paper aims to point at the significance of the cultivation of an imperial metropole identity that these publications served among the Istanbulian reading public.