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University of Arizona
"Tracking Technology Transfer: Techno-Social Agency Along the Ottoman Anatolian Railroad, 1890-1914"
Alex Schweig is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Arizona. He will use his 2017-2018 ITS Dissertation Writing Grant toward the goal of completing his dissertation this academic year. Titled "Tracking Technology Transfer: Techno-Social Agency Along the Ottoman Anatolian Railroad, 1890-1914," Alex's dissertation uses the construction and early operation of the Anatolian Railroad to examine the social history of technology in the late Ottoman Empire. Specifically, the dissertation looks at responses and adaptations to the railroad across a broad cross-section of the population of northwestern Anatolia, in order to expand the focus of railroad-driven modernization beyond the actions of the Ottoman state or European actors. It argues, instead, that local people were partial agents of their own modernization, which was formed dialectically between locals and outside actors. As a history of technology "from below" it addresses understudied topics within Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. |
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Princeton University
"The Great Armenian Flight: The Celali Revolts and the Rise of Western Armenian Society"
Henry R. Shapiro is a historian of the Early Modern Near East, with a particular interest in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires. His thesis—based on primary source research with Ottoman Turkish archival documents, Armenian narrative sources, and unpublished manuscripts in both Armenian and Armeno-Turkish—is entitled, "The Great Armenian Flight: The Celali Revolts and the Rise of Western Armenian Society." During the 2017-2018 academic year, Henry will be completing his doctoral thesis, funded with a generous dissertation writing grant from the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS). He is grateful to the Institute for supporting him during his last year of doctoral work, thus allowing him to devote his full attention to writing and editing. |
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University of California San Diego
"Speaking to the State: Petitions, Citizenship, and the Legacies of Ottoman Reform in Aleppo, 1868-1936"
Benjamin Smuin is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego and currently serves on the board of the Syrian Studies Association. His dissertation focuses on the development and practice of citizenship and nationality in Late Ottoman Aleppo and analyzes how this development contributed to individual and collective attempts to navigate the transition from empire to nation state after the end of World War I through an analysis of petitions as political and social discourse. With support from the US Student Fulbright Program, he conducted doctoral research at the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi from 2015-16, and has spent considerable time in British, French, and the League of Nations Archives. Thanks to the generous support of the Institute of Turkish Studies, he will be able to focus on the writing and completion of his dissertation during the 2017-2018 academic year. |
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University of Pittsburgh
"Refugees, Rights, Restrictions: Human Rights and the Evolution of the UNHCR in Turkey, 1960-1994"
Bennett Sherry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. With the support of a Dissertation Writing Grant from the Institute of Turkish Studies, he will complete his dissertation, "Refugees, Rights, Restrictions: Human Rights and the Evolution of the UNHCR in Turkey, 1960-1994" during the 2017-18 Academic Year. His work connects the international human rights movement with the global expansion of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This dissertation investigates how the UNHCR used human rights critiques as a tool to pressure the Turkish government and expand its operations in Ankara, growing form a three-person office into the UNHCR's largest country program. Bennett conducted research for this dissertation at the UNHCR archives in Geneva, state archives in Ankara and Washington, DC, and in the holdings of non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, the World Council of Churches, and the U.S. Committee for Refugees. |
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University of Akron
"Edirne during the Balkan Wars: Urban Life and Inter-communal Relations on the Eve of the Nation-State"
Pinar Odabasi Tasci is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Akron. Her research focuses on the late Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. She is spending 2016-2017 academic year as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Turkey to complete her dissertation research on Edirne during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. With the help of ITS Dissertation Writing Grant, she will complete her dissertation titled, "Edirne during the Balkan Wars: Urban Life and Inter-communal Relations on the Eve of the Nation-State." Edirne was once an imperial capital and is currently situated near the intersection of the borders between modern-day Turkey and its neighbors, Greece, and Bulgaria. Using this city in the western borderlands of the Ottoman Empire as a case study, her work explores urban dynamics in a period of war and transition from empire to nationstates. Her archival research is based on Ottoman state and military archives and contemporary press. |