Pfeifer, Helen. Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in the Early Modern Ottoman Lands. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022

Helen Pfeifer’s Empire of Salons employs the tools of intellectual and social history to analyze the role that salons played in the integration of the Arabic-speaking lands into the Ottoman Empire. Based primarily on Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, Pfeifer uses the figure of the Damascus-based scholar Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (1499-1577) and the members of his family and network to demonstrate that salons were of central importance to both Arabs and Rumis as they navigated the new, post-conquest realities of the 16th century.