Biographies

Susan Skilliter read Arabic and Persian at Newnham, graduating in 1954. She went on to work in the Near and Middle Eastern department of Cambridge University Library, where her discovery of an unrecorded Ottoman manuscript led her to do research under the guidance of Paul Wittek, Professor in Ottoman palaeography and history at SOAS. She did her Ph.D. at Manchester University, and in 1964 became the first – and only – Lecturer in Turkish at Cambridge. Apart from a period as a visiting associate professor at Wisconsin in 1972-3, she remained teaching at Cambridge for the rest of her life. She became an international authority in the field of Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy with the publication in 1977 of her book, William Harborne and the trade with Turkey, 1578-1582: a documentary study of the first Anglo-Ottoman relations.

 

Amongst her many commitments, she was a Council member of the Hakluyt Society and the Society for Mediterranean Studies, and became a Vice-President of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1985. An Associate at Newnham from 1978 and a Bye-Fellow from 1982, she left her extensive library and a substantial legacy to the college to set up a centre for Ottoman studies.