Mary Mills Patrick’s Constantinople Woman’s College was one of the most influential institutions of higher learning for women in the Middle East in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Patrick arrived in the 1870s to evangelize, but she gradually distanced herself from Christian proselytism in order to create a “cosmopolitan” college for all Ottoman women. Patrick was president of the Constantinople Woman’s College for 34 years, protecting the institution through the Balkan Wars, World War One, the British occupation of Constantinople, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the founding of the Turkish Republic. Just as the late Ottoman Empire underwent extraordinary changes, so did Patrick transform herself and the Constantinople College to meet the demands of a twentieth-century Muslim state, ultimately sacrificing her “cosmopolitan,” heterogeneous student body to an ethnically homogeneous one that reflected the newly racialized nationalism of the Turkish Republic. Mary Mills Patrick’s Cosmopolitan Mission and the Constantinople Woman’s College explores Patrick’s career from the 1870s to the 1930s, tracking her personal religious struggle and her professional transformation from Protestant evangelist, to feminist educator, to advocate for Muslim women, to, finally, supporter of Turkish nationalism.

This book examines international education in Turkey after World War I. In this period, a movement for peace and international education among American educators emerged. This effort, however, had to be reconciled with the nationalist projects of new nation-states emerging from the war. In the case of the Near East that meant coming to terms with the radically nationalist modernization project of Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish Republic. Using the case of Robert College, an American educational institution in Istanbul, which aimed to foster a future local elite of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious student body, the book sheds light on the negotiation between two conceptions of modernity, as represented by American internationalist ideals and the tenets of Kemalism the Westernizing, yet deeply ethnocentric national ideology of post-1923 Turkey. Based on recently declassified archival sources, this study addresses the educational intentions and strategies for adjustment of college faculty. It also offers a rare insight into the mindset of young students attempting to make sense of what internationalism and religious, ethnic and national identity meant in the Ottoman past and in the new republican Turkey. Focusing on Robert College and the forgotten case of its dean and social studies instructor, Dr. Edgar Jacob Fisher, it addresses the little-researched field of internationalism and peace education in interwar Turkey.

This book is the first to look at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's achievement as a vital figure in the women's literary tradition. Robert Halsband's book on her life, the sixth this century and published in 1956, was the first to apply scholarly techniques to establishing the facts. The inaccurateaccounts given before Halsband testify to Lady Mary's compelling interest as a woman who wrote, travelled, campaigned publicly for medical advance, gossiped, and was involved in high-profile literary quarrels. Knowledge of her life has made considerable gains since Halsband, as understanding of theissues involved in trying to move between the roles of proper lady and woman writer has increased enormously. This life fruitfully exploits the tension between literary history and feminist reading. Isobel Grundy highlights Montagu's adolescent longing for literary fame, her growing understandingof the implications of this for gender and class imperatives, the frustrations and concessions involved in her collaborations with male writers, the punitive responses of society, the gaps at every stage of her life between her ascertainable circumstances and her construction of herself in lettersand other writings. The book situates those writings in relation to her own theorizing and her very wide reading in women's texts as well as men's. Finally, it looks at a range of contemporary and near-contemporary responses.