Dr. Daniel Kolland

Daniel Kolland is a historian of late Ottoman history. After he attended university in Leipzig, Cairo, Munich and Istanbul, he wrote a PhD dissertation at Freie Universität, Berlin. The doctoral dissertation combined intellectual with social history by investigating how the crystallization of new Europe-centered concepts of historical time such as a civilization, progress, evolution and revolution was entangled with the emergence of a new privileged class of Francophile public intellectuals who vied for political leadership. Numerous journal articles analyzed their bid to social authority via a discourse of secularist 'modernity.' Since fall 2025, Daniel Kolland is the principal investigator of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation. It is a critical analysis of late Ottoman reform Islam, nationalism, and Islamism through the perspective of those who were marginalized by it. 

Between Remaking and Unmaking: The Religio-Secularization of late Ottoman Islam  

This project examines the conceptual history of Islam in the Ottoman Empire between 1876 and 1922. It draws on a newly available AI-assisted database (Müteferriqa) to analyze a large corpus of Turkish-language periodicals in Arabic script, written by figures ranging from Sufi poets to Islamist reformers. It focuses on two linked developments: first, the transformation of Islam into a national identity and a reform-oriented ideology promising worldly progress; and second, its redefinition through a global concept of “religion” as a distinct sphere of divine authority. Building on Markus Dressler’s concept of religio-secularization, the project analyzes how these processes reinforced each other. The project challenges narratives of an empire divided between religion and secularism by showing how these categories were themselves historically produced.

(PhD Dissertation published on microfiche, 2023) ”The Making and Universalization of New Time. A History of the Late Ottoman-Turkish Magazine Servet-i Fünûn (1891-1914).” Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin. 

(Book chapter) "Inculcating a Progress Mentality: Late Ottoman Struggles to Transform Society", in Zeit und Fortschritt. Arabische und osmanische Sichtweisen in ausgewählten Quellentexten des 19.-20. Jahrhunderts, (Hrsg.) Henning Sievert (Ergon/Nomos: Würzburg, 2024), 169–184. 

(peer-reviewed Artikel) “A Strategic Eurocentrism. The Construction of Ottoman Evolutionism in an Uneven World (1870-1900).” In: Modern Intellectual History 21 (2), S. 328–356.

(peer-reviewed Artikel) “Global Performances of a Belated Concept: Revisiting Modernity through Concept History.” Cromohs–Cyber Review of Modern Historiography (26), 95–113.

(Forthcoming 2026, peer-reviewed Artikel) “Porous Whiteness: Race, Europeanized Sensitivities, and the Making of Secularist Turkishness during the Hamidian Era.” In: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

(Forthcoming 2026, Buchkapitel) “İnḳılab-ı Tarih ve Tarih-i İnḳılap: Zamansal Dönüşüm Osmanlı Tarihine Uygulamak.” In: 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Düşünce Tarihini Yeniden Düşünmek, (Hrsg.) Şeyma Afacan (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları).