The Chancellor of the University of Helsinki cordially invites you to an inaugural lecture by the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies, Keith Brown, on Tuesday, 25 November 2025, at 16.00 in Runeberg Lecture Room, 2nd floor of the University of Helsinki Main Building, Aleksanterinkatu 5/Unioninkatu 34.
The lecture will be followed by refreshments in the foyer.
The topic of Professor Brown’s lecture will be Big Lies, Small Truths: American Microhistory and the Ottoman Atlantic, 1872–1924.
About the lecture
In late nineteenth century New England, Turkish and American lives were intimately entangled. U.S. military downsizing in the wake of the Civil War led New England arms manufacturers to seek out new markets overseas, and in 1872, the Providence Tool Company secured a multi-year contract to produce 600,000 modern breech-loading rifles for the Ottoman Empire. To oversee the production process, the Ottoman Army deployed approximately 30 military personnel to Providence as arms inspectors.
Media accounts at the time, and since, have tended either to frame these Turkish officers’ stories as individual curiosities, or to subsume their presence as mere example of a larger confrontation between “East” and “West.” But the clues they left, though fragmentary, suggest a more textured and contested cross-cultural encounter, as these male, Muslim representatives of a beleaguered empire navigated hierarchies of gender, class and race that were in the throes of transformation.
Through analysis of the words, actions, and relational networks of three Turkish officers, this lecture seeks to show how the practice of microhistory can broaden our perspectives on this dynamic period of US industrialization, global engagement and expansive patriotism.
About Keith Brown
Keith Brown is the current Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki, and Director of the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Arizona State University, where he is also a Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies.
His scholarly work has its roots in anthropology and has focused on Ottoman, Yugoslav and sovereign Macedonia. His current research and teaching explore the roles of Balkan labor migration and the transatlantic traffic of ideas and goods in wider geopolitical relations.
The inaugural lecture draws from an ongoing book project focusing on the transnational impacts of the nineteenth century arms trade between the emergent United States and the modernizing Ottoman Empire.
The Fulbright Finland Foundation
The Fulbright Finland Foundation is an independent not-for-profit based in Helsinki, Finland. With the purpose of promoting a wider exchange of knowledge and professional talents through educational contacts between Finland and the United States, the Foundation collaborates with a range of government, foundation, university and corporate partners on both sides of the Atlantic to design and manage study and research scholarships, leadership development programs and internationalization services.