Ahmed Tahir Nur’s scholarship traces conceptions and transmissions of knowledge and authority across the Asian and Mediterranean Worlds. He works on the contested concept of true knowledge and changing configurations of the sciences in the medieval and (early) modern Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish encyclopedias, ranging from language and history to philosophy and religion, from natural to social sciences, and from music to medicine. His dissertation seeks to refocus plural perspectives of knowledge in Islam by studying the changing configurations of knowledge in late medieval and early modern Islamicate cultures with particular emphasis on the Ottoman scholar Taşköprizade’s (d. 968/1561) encyclopedia of the sciences. His research projects, which aim at enhancing our understanding of different scientific strands in the global history of knowledge, received support from Andrew Mellon Foundation, European Commission, Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, Yale Macmillan Center, Beinecke Library, and Princeton Firestone Library. In addition to teaching courses on religion and philosophy at Yale, including Life Worth Living, Nur serves as an Associate Editor of Nazariyat Journal for the History of Islamic Philosophy and Science.
