Amy Singer is Associate Professor, Ottoman History, in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her recent publications include Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (2002), Middle East Historiographies (ed., 2006) and Feeding People, Feeding Power: Imarets in the Ottoman Empire (ed., 2007).