Saygin Salgirli is an art and architectural historian of the Ottoman and the Mediterranean worlds, focusing on the late medieval and early modern periods. He teaches a range of courses from European medieval art to the arts of the Islamicate world, including the modern period.

His current research explores the visualizations of the unseen and the invisible in early-modern Ottoman art; namely images of lands never visited and things never observed (geography and natural history), and images of things that could not have been seen (the occult.) Approaching image making not as illustration, but as an intricate component of knowledge production, he investigates how the visual(s) fused the knowledge ecologies of geography & natural history, and the occult.

In his previous research, Saygin Salgirli proposed a new methodology for a non-dichotomous architectural history of the late medieval Mediterranean that switched the focus from form and style to function and users’ experiences, hence dissolving typological taxonomies, and the East-West, Islamic-Christian binaries.

Salgirli is the author of The Fluctuating Sea: Architecture and Movement in the Medieval Mediterranean (Routledge, 2021), and the editor of Inside / Outside Islamic Art & Architecture: A Cartography of Boundaries in and of the Field (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Early Ottoman and Islamic art and architecture, medieval Mediterranean art and architecture, architectural history