Theodosia Sophroniades: Insider as Outsider in Late Ottoman Istanbul

The dissertation focuses on Theodosia Sophroniades, a long-neglected minority voice that resists essentialist narratives and fixed categories in Ottoman intellectual history. Chapter One emphasises her body of work and pioneering roles in the multilingual Ottoman milieu of the late nineteenth century, in stark contrast to her silencing in women’s historiography. It foregrounds her development of linguistic and cultural mediation within Ma‘rifet, in which she served as publisher, director, and editor-in-chief. Chapter Two examines her positioning as an ‘insider’, arguing that her articles in the Ottoman francophone press promoted Hamidian diplomacy as a means of maintaining her intellectual visibility on regime-backed platforms. French enabled her to distance herself from her own ethno-religious identity, while revealing a notable absence of features characteristic of Greek nationalist values and of the (non-)role of Orthodox Christianity. Chapter Three analyses her position as an ‘outsider’ within late Ottoman women’s writing, highlighting how she created a space for the dismantling of notions of mother, wife, and chaste woman. Her Western-centric feminist views engaged with Oriental exoticism through the aesthetics of Chinoiserie. Chapter Four applies the concept of ‘minor literature’ to her short story at the intersection of gender, language, and minority subjectivity. The research aims to contribute to the academic literature on the multidimensional gender debate of Ottoman women’s collective history.