Dr Kate Fleet
BA (SOAS), MA (Cantab), PhD (SOAS)
Fellow (A), Postgraduate Tutor, Deputy Senior Tutor, Director of the Skilliter Centre, Postgraduate Mentor
College Roles
- Fellow (A)
- Postgraduate Tutor
- Deputy Senior Tutor
- Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies
- Assistant Tutor (Postgraduates)
- Postgraduate Mentor
Contact
Telephone: 01223 335804
Email: khf11@cam.ac.uk
Biography
Dr Kate Fleet is an economic and social historian of the Ottoman empire, and Director of the Skilliter Centre.
Dr Kate Fleet was born in New Zealand where she spent part of her childhood. After studying Middle Eastern History with Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, she went back to New Zealand for several years. She then returned to the UK and to SOAS where she studied Turkish and did a Ph.D. on the commercial relations between the Turks and the Genoese, 1300-1453. She was appointed to the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge in 1991 and became Director in 2000.
Kate Fleet, who is a member of the History Faculty at Cambridge, has taught Ottoman history at SOAS, and Ottoman history, Middle Eastern history and modern Turkish history at Cambridge, where she was the Newton Trust Lecturer in Ottoman History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the History Faculty from 2001 to 2011.
Research Interests
Dr Kate Fleet is Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies.
Her books include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), together with Ebru Boyar, and, with Svetla Ianeva, Ottoman Economic Practices in Periods of Transformation: the Cases of Crete and Bulgaria (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014). She is editor of volume I of The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium-Turkey, 1071-1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and, together with Suraiya Faroqhi, of volume II, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). She was Co-Editor of Eurasian Studies from 2002 to 2006, is Editor-in-Chief of Turkish Historical Review and has been an Executive Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three since 2012.
Her research interests include
- Ottoman economic and social history
- the economic history of the eastern Mediterranean in the early modern period, especially Genoese, Venetian and Florentine relations with the Ottomans, the Turkish beyliks and the Mamluks
- early Turkish Republican economic and social history, including foreign economic activities in the region
- western historiography on the Ottoman empire and Turkey.