Gábor Ágoston was born and educated in Hungary. He earned his M.A. and University Doctorate (Doctor universitatis) from the University of Budapest (ELTE) and his Ph.D. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Between 1985 and 1998 he taught Hungarian, Ottoman and Balkan history at the Universities of Budapest and Pecs (JPTE), Hungary. Since 1998 he has been a faculty member of Georgetown’s History Department, where he teaches courses on Ottoman and Middle Eastern history, the Balkans and the Black Sea. In 2003 he was Gastprofessor at the Institute of History, University of Vienna, Austria. His field of research includes Ottoman military, economic and social history from the fifteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, early modern Hungarian history, and the comparative study of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. His latest book, Guns of the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005; Turkish-, Arabic-, and German-language editions are under contract) challenges the sweeping generalizations of Eurocentric and Orientalist scholarship regarding Ottoman and Islamic societies. In addition to four Hungarian-language books, he has published more than fifty scholarly articles and book chapters in English, Hungarian, Turkish, German, French and Italian on Ottoman, European and Hungarian history.