Victoria Rowe Holbrook

I started out in New York City in music, which led to philosophy, classics and Near East studies. I trained in Islamics at Harvard, learning the Arabic sciences, and by the time of my Princeton dissertation on Ottoman poetry had fluency in Persian and near-native Turkish. For 2 decades I was a professor of Turkish literary and cultural studies at Ohio State University, a program I founded. I resigned in 2005 to write and translate in Istanbul, where since 2009 I also run and teach a large freshman humanities course I designed for the Architecture Faculty of Bilgi University.