Cemal Kafadar (born 1954) is Professor of History and the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies in the Harvard University Department of History. He is an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society.^[1]

Kafadar graduated from Robert College, then Hamilton College, and received his PhD from the McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies in 1987 and taught for two years in Princeton's Near Eastern Studies department before going to Harvard.^[2] Kafadar teaches seminars related to popular culture, hagiography and Ottoman historiography as well as the early modern history of the Middle East and Balkans.^[3] He is a member of the editorial board of the Historians of the Ottoman Empire and was a member of the jury of the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival in 2009.^[4]

He is the author of the book Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (1995).^[5][6]

Selected publications

• Kafadar, Cemal (1989). "Self and others: the diary of a dervish in seventeenth century Istanbul and first-person narratives in Ottoman literature". Studia Islamica. 69 (69): 121–150. doi:10.2307/1596070. JSTOR 1596070.
• Kafadar, Cemal (1991). "On the purity and corruption of the janissaries". Turkish Studies Association Bulletin. 15 (2): 273–280. JSTOR 43385269.
• İnalcık, Halil; Kafadar, Cemal, eds. (1993). Sülaymân the Second and His Time. Istanbul: Isis Press. ISBN 978-975-428-052-4.
• Kafadar, Cemal (1995). Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20600-7.
• Kafadar, Cemal (1999). "The question of Ottoman decline". Harvard Middle East and Islamic Review. 4 (1–2): 30–75.
• Kafadar, Cemal (2009). Kim Var İmiş Biz Burada Yoğ İken Dört Osmanlı: Yeniçeri, Tüccar, Derviş ve Hatun (in Turkish). Istanbul: Metis. ISBN 978-975-342-706-7.
• Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell Fleischer, eds. (2019). Treasures of Knowledge. An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4). 2 vols. Leiden: Brill.^[7]