I'm interested in all aspects of politics and life in the late Ottoman Empire, and the transition from imperial governance to a world of nation-states and colonialism between the 18th and and 20th centuries in the Balkans and Middle East. My first book, Biography of an Empire, had to do with a curious elite-of Christian functionaries for the Ottoman state-in the 18th and 19th centuries, whose migration throughout the Balkans, through Istanbul, and into eastern Europe and Russia was pivotal for the form of power they achieved. My second book, Turkey: A Past Against History, focused on the Turkish concept of muhalefet, meaning opposition and dissent, in the transit from an Ottoman constitutional regime to the Turkish Republic in the early 20th century, and I traced that story through the life and works of a writer who was exiled multiple times and found himself perennially in opposition to power. I am currently directing a collaborative project called Istanpolis, which aims at a granular reconstruction of the social and demographic trends among Greek Orthodox communities of late Ottoman Istanbul, for whom migration to and from the provinces was a fact of life.
Publications: Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2010); Turkey: A Past Against History (2021); "The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn," Comparative Studies in Society and History (2012); "The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Knowledge," PublicBooks (2015); "The Paradox of Perceptions: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present," Middle Eastern Studies (2008).
