Acknowledgments

Christensen, Peter H.

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Acknowledgments

Peter H. Christensen

Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure

~The layered process of making objects that I outline in this book is one that I recognize as transposable too to the process of making a book. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the many people who helped me form this book in myriad ways over many years. It has been a pleasure to work with Katherine Boller at Yale University Press, whose faith in this project set,...

Author

Peter H. Christensen

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20714

Acknowledgments

The layered process of making objects that I outline in this book is one that I recognize as transposable too to the process of making a book. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the many people who helped me form this book in myriad ways over many years. It has been a pleasure to work with Katherine Boller at Yale University Press, whose faith in this project set, and kept, the ball rolling. I wish also to thank Tamara Schechter for her administrative guidance, Heidi Downey for her editorial direction, Laura Hensley for her superb copy editing, and Leslie Fitch and Jo Ellen Ackerman for their work on the design. It has been an honor to work with a publisher so committed to art-historical scholarship as well as such finely produced books.

One cannot make things without time and resources, and I have received both from a number of institutions. To complete the manuscript, I benefited from fellowships from the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, the University of Rochester Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. As junior faculty at the Technische Universität Munich, I was able to divide my time between writing and teaching in a most productive way. At the research phase, I received support from the Fulbright Commission, the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, also at Harvard. Support for this publication in the form of a subvention was provided by the Society of Architectural Historians Mellon Author Award and the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester.

For over a decade I have benefited from the mentorship and intellectual compasses of Mary Woods, Barry Bergdoll, and Nasser Rabbat. Earlier parts of the project came to fruition under the superlative guidance of three mentors at Harvard University, Eve Blau, Gülru Necipoğlu, and Antoine Picon, whose collective scholarly rigor I have emulated. My colleagues and students in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester, as well as the university’s remarkably supportive administration, have furnished the ideal scholarly environment in which this book could both grow intellectually and be completed logistically. Our indefatigable chair, A. Joan Saab, and my incisive and generous colleagues Rachel Haidu, Janet Berlo, and Douglas Crimp deserve special mention for mulling over drafts and ideas along the way. Teaching students in the Graduate Program of Visual and Cultural Studies has pushed me to see my work in broader terms, and I thank Eitan Freedenberg, Stephanie Alana Wolf-Johnson, Berin Golonu, Alicia Chester, Mimi Cheng, and Julia Tulke for their stimulating engagement with all things architecture, industry, and infrastructure in the classroom. Nora Dimmock, Joshua Romphf, Blair Tinker, and Stephanie Frontz of the University of Rochester library system have gone above and beyond the call of duty on so many fronts. In the wider field I also owe thanks to Esra Akcan, Sibel Bozdoğan, Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Ken Oshima, Hazel Hahn, Avinoam Shalem, Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Mary Roberts, Shundana Yusaf, Mrinalini Rajagopalan, and Itohan Osayimwese for their various engagements with this material in a number of scholarly venues.

I am lucky to have friends who engage my work with such interest, while also providing the social nourishment that has kept me attuned to the vitality and importance of exchange in the process of crafting scholarship. For this I thank Kenny Cupers, Miriam Peterson, Mary Blakemore, Freya Estrellar, Natasha Case, Jenny Sedlis, Noam Andrews, Igor Demchenko, David Roxburgh, Dan Sullivan, Nathan Rich, Jenny French, Maureen Jeram, Tanya Bakhmetyeva, Stewart Weaver, Laura Smoller, Llerena Searle, Ben DeLee, Anne Schmidt, Casey Miller, Christian Larsen, and Oğuz Orkum Doma.

My parents, Patricia Hewitt and Dale Christensen, have furnished every intellectual horizon on which this book rests. I owe them far more than a few words here, but I also take great pleasure in knowing how happy they will be to hold this book in their hands. Finally, I thank Robert for his support, patience, and intelligence from the beginning to the end of the process behind this book, a true Komplizenschaft.

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