Dr Derya Gurses Tarbuck
University of Mersin, Turkey
Derya Gurses Tarbuck is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Mersin university, Turkey. Her research interests and publications to date are on Early Modern European intellectual history, focusing especially on the cultural, religious, scientific and political contexts of early modern mentalities. Her current research interests are in the areas of Enlightenment sociabilities, the history of science and religion, the Enlightenment-Counter Enlightenment debates in the eighteenth century, and the Scottish Enlightenment. Since completing her PhD in 2004, Dr Tarbuck has held fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (2004-05) and the University of California at Los Angeles (2007-08).
While at CRASSH Dr Tarbuck will work on The Fair Intellectual Club, which was founded in 1717 in Edinburgh by women, initially as a clandestine society. She is aiming to research the ways in which a study of the Club would hlep provide not only one of the earliest examples of a groundbreaking alternative to Universities as Enlightenment Institutions, but also opens up new possibilities of knowledge-production in the eighteenth century, a philosophical knowledge that went beyond the walls of institutional spheres of learning.
Her recent publications include 'The Hutchinsonian Defence of Old Testament Trinitarian Christianity: The Controversy over Elahim', History of European Ideas, 29, 2003, 393-412; 'Academic Hutchinsonians and their Search for Relevance', History of European Ideas, 31, 2005, 408-427; 'Duncan Forbes of Culloden (1658-1747): a Presbyterian Whig and a Hutchinsonian', Eighteenth-Century Thought, 3, 2007, 331-48; 'Rethinking the Secularist Enlightenment Project in Scotland' Intellectual History Review 17 (3), 2007, 337-344.
