AB 2 1 Ann Lesch's talk on Mine Ener's research for the symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, April 9, 2004 A year and a half ago, when Mine Ener applied for promotion to associate professor, she described her teaching philosophy: "As teachers, we have the opportunity to help make the world a better place. As an historian, knowledge of the past and a vision of a more just society motivate what I do and how I interact with my students As part of her approach to teaching, Mine stressed "the imperativeness of putting ourselves in the shoes - and within the reality - of those whom we study." And, she added, "I urge my students to not analyze events from the viewpoint of where we are today as a society, but rather from within the mind-set of the peoples who lived through particular eras." Mine's perspective on scholarship was similarly informed by her commitment to social justice: "I am committed to exploring aspects of the social history of [the Middle East] which have heretofore not been examined. Guiding my work is a desire to recover the voice of a variety of people - the urban and rural poor, women, and children - whose experiences are absent from the historical record." It was in this spirit that Seth Koven observed at Mine's memorial service: "In your scholarly pursuits, you set out to find what you called ‘missing people' - those men, women, and children society had thrown away, or lost or forgotten because they were too poor, too sick, too broken in body, to make their own way inthe world. Out of the most taciturn fragments of the past, you fashioned a rich portrait of this world of missing people: those who loved and cared for them as well as those who controlled and punished them." Mine's research required years of preparation and long hours laboring in archives. She had to master written Arabic and Ottoman Turkish before she could enter those archives in Cairo and Istanbul. She had to be able to read many different scripts and master various handwriting styles, and she also had to copy most of the documents by hand (given the archives’ severe restrictions on photocopying) . Practically none of the documents were catalogued, much less indexed. And yet those long hours could be suddenly rewarding. she remarked on one such moment, in her application: "Four months into my research [in the National Archives in Cairo], poring through +++ a chronological listing of registers on the municipal government of Cairo, I requested an item entitled ‘Salary Records, Cairo Governorate’... I found that this register was part of a twenty volume series listing the names, admissions, and releases of poor-house inmates... That data became a key aspect of my dissertation." Altogether, Mine examined materials from sixteen different government offices, ranging from police records in Cairo and Alexandria, to data from the ministries of the army, hospitals, and Islamic endowments, which provided extensivecharitable assistance to the poor. she also studied records of the Cabinet, Council of Justice, and especially the Cairo municipal government, including boxes of petitions to officials, along with their responses to those petitioners. She mined the Public Records Office in England and examined nine sets of newspapers (five in Arabic) as well as nearly 400 books, articles, and dissertations. Later, Mine complemented her two years of research in Cairo with research in Istanbul in the summer of 1997 and the spring of 2000 on ARIT and SSRC funding, focusing on poor relief in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. That research opened up important comparative data for her to analyze. As she wrote in her promotion application, the research revealed similarities and differences between Istanbul and Cairo and led to her publishing one article on “how Egypt's policies of poor relief were a hybridization of both Western and Ottoman and Islamic practices" and another article (in Social Science History) that situated "Egypt's policies of poor relief within multiple colonial contexts." It also launched her on a new project on poor relief in late Ottoman Islanbul, including, in her projected collaborative project with Beth Baron, an examination of "Ottoman women's philanthropic activities during the Balkan Wars and World War I." But, to return to her dissertation -- Her exhaustive research in the Cairo archives was at times exhausting. But, as she wrote in the acknowledgments section to her book, she could not have