Cornell Fleischer, who specialized in the history of the Ottoman Empire and the greater Islamic world at the University of Chicago, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship — frequently referred to as the “genius grant” — in 1988 for his scholarship.

“What was important about him was that he had a very broad conception about what our field consisted of,” said retired U. of C. Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations professor John Woods. “He didn’t like to be pigeonholed as just an Ottomanist or just a Turkologist.”

Fleischer, 72, died of complications related to interstitial lung disease on April 21 at his Hyde Park home, said Christopher Markiewicz, who was Fleischer’s godson.

Born in Berkeley, California, Fleischer was the son of Hugh Fleischer, a U.S. diplomat. His childhood was spent in Cairo, Baghdad, Tokyo and Pasadena, California, and he graduated from high school in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1968.

Fleischer received a bachelor’s degree, his master’s and a doctorate from Princeton University, where he studied under noted Near Eastern studies scholar Martin Dickson.

Fleischer taught at Ohio State University and Washington University in St. Louis before joining the U. of C.’s faculty in 1993. He worked in the university’s departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and History. He was considered an expert in the Age of Suleiman the Lawgiver, a 16th-century sultan who was the Ottoman Empire’s longest-reigning ruler.

Fleischer was drawn to his field because of his childhood experiences living in Cairo, Markiewicz said.

“He used to say he considered Cairo to be his home. I think these feelings were what drew him to first start studying Arabic seriously as an undergraduate,” Markiewicz said. “Cornell had an amazing ability with language … (and) through this interest, Cornell became fascinated with and committed to study the rich prose and verse works of the Ottomans, which became for him a window into seeing an entire world.”

Ahmed El Shamsy, who chairs the U. of C.’s department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, noted that Fleischer grew up in a time when diplomats did not reside in gated communities and thus had a “near-native familiarity with these places and their language.”

“He loved taking (U. of C.) students to the Middle East, showing them the places he loved so much, and coaching them to navigate the unfamiliar environment,” El Shamsy said. “He always emphasized the importance of the lived experience that he had in those areas.”

Markiewicz said, “His students were like his family, especially perhaps since he did not have much family.” Many of his students are now “tenured professors in the United States and Europe, and in many ways are leaders in the field of Ottoman studies,” said Markiewicz, who did his doctoral studies under Fleischer.

In 1986, Fleischer published “Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali,” which grew out of his doctoral dissertation. The book was a biography of a midlevel bureaucrat in the Ottoman Empire and drew on not just archival materials but also narrative sources as a means to understand the Ottoman world’s intellectual landscape.

The book remains noteworthy “because it is such a sensitive and full handling of the life of an Ottoman gentleman who lived more than 400 years ago,” Markiewicz said.

Beyond Fleischer’s book’s direct impact on Ottoman studies, it “could serve as a model for people doing many other kinds of histories,” said University of California-Los Angeles history professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

“I always told my students who worked on India, ‘If you want to do a kind of intellectual history, this is a book that represents a model for you,’” Subrahmanyam said. “Immediately the book had an impact outside of Ottoman history.”

The book also led to Fleischer being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988.

“I knew my work was good, but I didn’t expect it to be seen as original,” Fleischer told the Tribune in a 1995 article on MacArthur Fellows.

Subrahmanyam said Fleischer was something of a perfectionist in his work.

“Because of that, maybe he was not as productive as he might have been, but on the other hand, he trained a lot of people, and what he showed was how reading texts and documents closely was really still the essential bread and butter of our profession,” Subrahmanyam said.

In 1997, Fleischer traveled to Bosnia to monitor that country’s first municipal elections. And in 1998, he worked with a Harvard University scholar to try to help rebuild the holdings in the Bosnian national library, which was destroyed by Serbian nationalists’ bombing during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that ended in 1995.

Two marriages ended in divorce. Fleischer is survived by a daughter, Daria.

The U. of C. is planning a memorial service for later this year.

Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

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