Irvin Cemil Schick was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and obtained his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989. He has taught at Harvard University and M.I.T., where he is now a researcher. He is the author of The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse and The Fair Circassian: Adventures of an Orientalist Motif (in Turkish), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives, European Female Captives and their Muslim Masters: Narratives of Captivity from "Turkish Lands" (in Turkish), Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender,Culture, History, and the M. Ugur Derman 65th Birthday Festschrift.