Cornell Fleischer (October 23, 1950 – April 21, 2023) was an American historian and the Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at the University of Chicago.

Education and career

The son of an American diplomat, Fleischer grew up in Germany, Egypt, Iraq, and California. He also lived in Turkey for nine years. He began his studies at Brown University before transferring to Princeton as a “critical language” undergraduate student to study Arabic. He continued in the Department of Near Eastern Studies for his Ph.D., completing his dissertation, “Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli Efendi, 1541–1600: A Study in Ottoman Historical Consciousness,” in 1982. This work formed the basis of his book, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âli (Princeton University Press, 1986). Following the publication of this book he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988. He was also the co-editor with Gülrü Necipoğlu and Cemal Kafadar of Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4) (Brilll, 2019) and authored numerous articles. Fleischer taught at Ohio State University and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and History at the University of Chicago in 1993. He later became the inaugural holder of the Kanuni Süleyman Chair in Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Chicago. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and was presented with the Order of Merit, Turkey’s highest civilian order, by President Gül.He was also a former director of the University of Chicago's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and a member of the editorial board of Historians of the Ottoman Empire.

Publications