40th Anniversary of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies
On 9 July 2025, the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies celebrated its 40th anniversary with a reception in Newnham College and a conference on The Ottomans and Diplomacy.
Many of the reception attendees had supported the Centre over the years, including several Newnham College alumnae who went on a tour of Turkey in 2005 with Dr Kate Fleet and Professor Ebru Boyar. The lectures from this tour formed the basis for their book, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul. One attendee, Wendy Cater (NC 1951), was also a friend of Susan Skilliter and brought her tribute “from a contemporary to one of Newnham’s perhaps least-known benefactors – undeservedly so, for it is to her that we owe one of the College’s half-hidden jewels: the glorious haven, a feast for mind and senses, that is the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies”.
The richness of the Centre’s collection stems in part from the generous donations of scholars and benefactors. Through the scholarships generously supported by the donation of Sir Mark and Lady Judy Moody-Stuart, PhD students from the University of Cambridge have been able to spend time in Turkey, doing research in archives and libraries there while improving their language skills in Turkish and Ottoman.
Skilliter Centre Director Dr Kate Fleet recollected the Centre’s origins:
Looking back over the many years that I have been at the Skilliter Centre and at Newnham, I am struck by how much has changed since I arrived as a PhD student outside the doors of the Principal’s Lodge, where Susan Skilliter’s books were housed, to now, where they line the walls of the spacious and beautiful Centre in the heart of the College. I hope that both Susan Skilliter, whose vision it was to found a centre for research within a college – a first at that time – and Sheila Browne, the Principal of Newnham, who saw the Centre established and guided its initial development, would be pleased to see where it is today.
The Centre has become an international intellectual hub, linking scholars across the world either through conferences and seminars, workshops and research projects or through scholarships and research affiliations which have brought them to the Centre to research, present papers and discuss ideas.
The Centre’s Library and archive collection has grown enormously since its initial beginnings on the first floor of the Principal’s Lodge. A library is not merely a collection of books but also an accumulation of the volumes of scholars who have gone before and whose heritage lives on in their research and the materiality of what remains on the shelves. In this, the Centre is a repository of past learning and a launchpad for future research being developed and produced by the up and coming generations of new scholars.
Looking forward to the next 40 years, I hope that the Centre will continue to offer a location of scholarly contemplation among its books and archives, of stimulation and intellectual challenge through its research projects, conferences and seminars, and of international academic connections and communications through its community of scholars.
The Ottomans & Diplomacy conference ran from 10-12 July and included 26 papers from historians from France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the UK and the US. The full programme is online.
