Daria Kohler and Elif Sezer Receive J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award

28 June 2024

Photo: CSMC

Gumbert Award winners Daria Kohler (left) and Elif Sezer (middle) with CSMC director Konrad Hirschler (right).

The two early-career researchers won the award for outstanding doctoral theses in the field of manuscript research in 2023. They have now received their certificates.

The CSMC and its Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ have been awarding the J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award since 2021, but it was only this year that the award was presented in person for the first time. Elif Sezer, who gave an Informal Talk entitled ‘Written by the Folks: A Material Exploration of Popular Storybooks from the Last Ottoman Manuscript Age’ yesterday, and Daria Kohler, who is currently a fellow at the CSMC, received the award from CSMC Director Konrad Hirschler.

The dissertation of Elif Sezer is entitled A Manuscript Community in Ottoman Istanbul (18th-19th Centuries): Heroic Stories, Social Profiles, and Reading Space. Her study explores a reading community that formed around the manuscripts of popular heroic stories in Istanbul in the 18th and 19th centuries, based on first-hand manuscript notes. This community is highly diverse in profile, shared moral and social values, and a heroic past which can be seen in their reactions to the plot, in the doodles of story characters, and in their notes while communicating with other readers on the pages. The aspects of performance, as the main form of interaction with these texts in coffeehouses, shops, mansions, and other public spaces, are also interrogated through the thousands of formulaic notes. These notes, referred to as collective reading notes, illuminate the nicknames, occupations, and hometowns of performers and audiences, alongside the address, location, and aspects of collective reading in the period. In this way, the dissertation contributes to the fields of manuscript studies, the history of the book, as well as the Ottoman literary, social, and cultural history.

Daria Kohler has written a dissertation on ‘Publication’, papyri, and literary texts: process and presentation. Her thesis is a study of the concept of ‘literary publication’ and ‘publishing’ in the Greek and Roman world between the 4th century BCE and 2nd century CE, which combines a reinterpretation of the literary evidence with insights about the materiality of book production, as well as case studies and statistics from Greek and Latin papyri. It provides a deeper understanding of the mutual influence of the material context of book production and its reflection in the literary sources, and claims a relevance of the idea of ‘publishing’ a literary work for the authors and readers of Greco-Roman antiquity.

The J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award honours the best doctoral thesis defended in each year that contributes to any aspect of the study of manuscripts and other written artefacts. The award includes a prize money of 5,000 Euro and a fellowship for a research stay at CSMC. 

Johan Peter Gumbert (1936–2016) was Professor and Professor Emeritus of Western Palaeography and Codicology at Leiden University from 1979 to 2001, and an expert on Latin and Dutch manuscripts. As a frequent guest at the Universität Hamburg, he was associated with the CSMC from its very beginning as well as with the COMSt-Network (Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies).

Previous winners of the award are Jeremiah Coogan (2021), who is currently a fellow at CSMC, Hui Sun (2021), Mallory E. Matsumoto (2022), and Madalina Toca (2022).

Details of the J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award 2024 will be announced in September this year.