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John Curry, Full Professor, received his B.A. in history with a minor in sub-Saharan African Studies from Northwestern University (1992). After spending a year in Cairo, Egypt and other parts of the Near East on a Fulbright scholarship during the 1992-93 academic year, he returned to acquire a dual M.A. from The Ohio State University in both the Department of History and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (1998). After several years of work and research in Turkey’s manuscript libraries and archives, he completed his dissertation on early modern Ottoman religious history and received his Ph.D. in History from The Ohio State University (2005).

Prof. Curry’s research has focused on a variety of topics. His first book, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order 1350-1650 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), is a history of mystical, religious, and intellectual movements in the Ottoman Empire. This project continued in the form of an edited volume of twelve articles on aspects of Islamic mysticism, co-edited with Prof. Erik S. Ohlander, Sufism and Society: Arrangements of the Mystical in the Muslim World 1200-1800 (Routledge Press, 2012). Prof. Curry co-wrote the introduction and contributed a chapter in the volume entitled "The Meeting of the Two Sultans': Three Sufi Mystics Negotiate with the Court of Murad III." More recently, he has published the landmark reference article on “Sufism in the Ottoman Empire” in the Routledge Handbook on Sufism (Routledge, 2021), and “Sufi Spaces and Practices” in A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), a pioneering project on the urban history of the Ottoman Empire. He has also published a number of scholarly articles in Turkish-language publications.

Prof. Curry is also a noted translator of medieval and early modern Muslim literature and history. He worked for over a a decade as part of a team that translated the universal geographical compendium of the Ottoman scholar and polymath Katip Celebi (d. 1657), which was released as An Ottoman Cosmography: Translation of Cihannüma (Brill, 2021). The longest translation of any Ottoman source into English, the translation demonstrates the intersection between newly-acquired European geographies like the Mercator Atlases and the geographical traditions of the Islamic world, along with the Ottoman reception of the Scientific Revolution. 

Prof. Curry has also just completed work on a National Endowment for the Humanities project to translate the “Book of China,” an account of the Ming Dynasty in the early 1500s from the perspective of a Central Asian merchant and envoy. In the process, he uncovered a previously-unknown autograph manuscript of the author that had survived in the Ottoman manuscript libraries. The work will be published as The Book of China (Columbia University Press, 2025) in the coming year. His current research projects focus on the intersection between Mediterranean corsairs and religious movements, often drawn from the personal manuscript libraries of local religious leaders in the Ottoman capital.

Prof. Curry regularly teaches a survey in World History, and currently serves as the Higher Education Co-Chair of the Advanced Placement World History Exam Development Committee for the College Board, assisting in producing questions for the national exam for over 400,000 high school students each year. He also teaches courses in the history of the Islamic world, along with a course on the impacts of climate change on world history, commencing with the Late Bronze Age.