Kent F. Schull

Kent F. Schull
Born
💼 Occupation
🏅 Awards	SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

Kent F. Schull is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. He is an associate professor of history at Binghamton University and director of its Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies (CMENAS). His research has focused on Ottoman social and legal history, criminal justice and incarceration, state formation, migration and displacement, and religious minorities.

Schull is the author of Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (2014) and has co-edited several volumes on Ottoman identity, law, and international legal history. In addition to his academic appointments, he is series editor of Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire and formerly edited the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Education and academic career

Schull received a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University, an MSt from the University of Oxford, and MA and PhD degrees in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He completed his doctorate at UCLA in 2007. His doctoral research included extended archival work in Istanbul supported by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. He has subsequently been a two-time Fulbright scholar to Turkey.

Schull became a faculty member in the history department at Binghamton University, where he is associate professor of Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. In 2025, he was the Dumanian Visiting professor in Armenian Studies at the University of Chicago.

He received the State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2017–2018.

Academic and administrative leadership

Schull directs Binghamton University's Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies. The university's history department has credited him with establishing the center. In 2023, CMENAS was designated a National Resource Center by the United States Department of Education under its Title VI program and received a three-year grant of nearly $1 million. The funding supported Middle Eastern language instruction, interdisciplinary teaching, educational outreach, and cooperation with other institutions in the State University of New York system.

Schull also directs Binghamton's Ottoman Demographic, Social, and Family History Research Group. The group has collaborated with FamilySearch International on the development of handwritten-text-recognition methods for Ottoman Turkish records. Binghamton's history department reported in 2025 that Schull and CMENAS had secured more than $1 million in external support for work that included this digital-humanities initiative.

Outside university administration, Schull has held a number of scholarly editorial positions. He served as editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and is series editor of Edinburgh University Press's Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire, a monograph series devoted to the political, social, religious, economic, and cultural history of the empire and its interactions with surrounding regions. He has also served on the board of the American Civic Association, an organization in the Binghamton area providing services to immigrants and refugees, and is its vice president as of 2026.

Scholarship

Schull's principal monograph, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014. The book examines the transformation of Ottoman prisons and criminal justice during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, treating prisons as sites through which broader processes of administrative centralization, legal reform, bureaucratic professionalization, gender classification, rehabilitation, and social engineering can be studied. Schull argues against interpreting Ottoman penal reform simply as the adoption of European institutions, instead presenting it as part of a specifically Ottoman process of state transformation in which officials, prisoners, and local actors negotiated the implementation of central reforms.

The book received substantial attention in the academic literature. Reviewing it in The American Historical Review, Isa Blumi characterized Schull's approach as a challenge to interpretations that associate biopolitical state reform exclusively with Westernization and described the study as the first fairly comprehensive English-language survey of the forces behind Ottoman prison reform from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Nazan Maksudyan, writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, described the book as an original contribution filling a gap in the historiography of Ottoman incarceration and noted Schull's attempt to move beyond a purely Foucauldian understanding of prisons as institutions of surveillance and control. Ebru Boyar similarly noted that the study sought to combine imperial and local perspectives, juxtaposing state reform with the experiences of inmates and prison personnel rather than treating late Ottoman transformation exclusively from the viewpoint of the central government.

Schull's edited volumes have extended these interests beyond penal history. With Christine Isom-Verhaaren, he edited Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries (2016), whose contributors examine changing forms of Ottoman identity across the history of the empire through individuals and communities of different religious, ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds. He also co-edited Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey (2016), a collection examining sociolegal change from the early modern Ottoman period through the Turkish Republic, and The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (2020), which brought Ottoman sociolegal history into dialogue with trans-imperial history, international law, sovereignty, citizenship, and extraterritoriality.

His later work has also addressed Christian missionary activity, Armenians, and religious minorities in the Ottoman Middle East. With James A. Toronto, Schull edited Missionary in the Middle East: The Journals of Joseph Wilford Booth (2024), an annotated and contextualized selection from the journals of an early Latter-day Saint missionary who worked in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states between 1898 and 1928. The edition uses Booth's records to document missionary life, relations with Ottoman officials, inter-Christian relations, the Armenian communities among whom the missionaries worked, and the upheavals surrounding the First World War and the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Selected works

Books

• Schull, Kent F. (2014). Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-4173-4. Search this book on

• Isom-Verhaaren, Christine; Schull, Kent F., eds. (2016). Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-01943-1. Search this book on

• Schull, Kent F.; Saraçoğlu, M. Safa; Zens, Robert, eds. (2016). Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-02092-5. Search this book on

• Can, Lâle; Low, Michael Christopher; Schull, Kent F.; Zens, Robert, eds. (2020). The Subjects of Ottoman International Law. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-05661-0. Search this book on

• Toronto, James A.; Schull, Kent F., eds. (2024). Missionary in the Middle East: The Journals of Joseph Wilford Booth. Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University. ISBN 978-1-9503-0458-5. Search this book on

External links

• Faculty profile, Binghamton University

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