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RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
| Dissertation and Beyond | Pre-Dissertation Stuff |
| Book Project | |
| Dissertation (May, 2007) | |
| IJMES article (Feb. 2007) | |
| Ab Imperio article (2008/4) | |
I am currently working on a manuscript, based upon my dissertation, which looks at the emergence of Muslim community leadership politics in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I focus upon the triangular sets of relations which developed between regional officials working in tsarist administration, Muslim communities, and the individuals and institutions which emerged during these years to present themselves as spokespersons for Muslim interests in communications with tsarist officials.
One thing that I think this project adds to the historiography is that it focuses upon relations and interactions between Muslims and the state. Lately, a lot of literature has been produced (by Russianist historians) which looks at tsarist policies towards Muslims in Russia, but this work tends to be based mainly upon tsarist state archival sources and employs little or no source material that was produced in the language's of Russia's Muslim communities. Meanwhile, a number of scholars with a background in Islamic studies have looked closely at religious practice among Muslims in Russia, but these studies tend to ignore the existence of the tsarist state altogether. My work, on the other hand, is interested in looking at the ways in which Muslims and state officials working in the regions interacted with one another, and at questions like how tsarist policies impacted Muslim views of the tsarist state and the place of Muslims within it.
Something else that I think is important about my study is that it provides a comparative approach. There have been numerous works which look at issues pertaining to Muslim communities living in just one region of the empire, and the few studies which do look at several regions (such as Robert Crews' recent book) tend to do so from the standpoint of trans-imperial similarity, rather than regional difference. Ultimately, I argue that focusing upon similarity across the empire means adopting St. Petersburg's narrative regarding the administration of Muslims in Russia, and ignores both the importance of regional variations regarding tsarist policies towards Muslims and the varying attitudes of Muslim communities in the empire vis-a-vis the state authorities they encountered.
I'm still in the early stages of revising my dissertation, but hope to have more news posted regarding this project before too much time passes. The provisional title of this manuscript is: Homeland in the Tsar's Domains: Muslim Communities and Regional Rule in Late Imperial Russia.
Dissertation (Abstract) (Works Cited)
My dissertation is entitled Turkic Worlds: Community Representation and Collective Identity in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1870-1914. Originally, I had approached this work from the perspective of late Ottoman intellectual history, and thought that I would devote just a cursory chapter to the pre-Istanbul careers of the well-known "pan-Turkist" intellectuals Yusuf Akçura, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Ali Bey Hüseyinzade, and Mehmet Emin Resulzade--as well as anyone else I could find who seemed to fit in with this group. Ultimately, however, five of my dissertation's six chapters would take place in Russia. Rather than only focusing upon these figures as intellectuals, or "thoereticians" of nationalism, I sought to investigate their political (in terms of mass politics) activity in Russia, and the ways in which these activities related to their public articulations of various types of collective identity.
Over the course of three research trips in Russia, as well as other research trips to Azerbaijan, the Crimea, and Istanbul, my approach to this work began to change. Rather than focusing only upon these well-known figures, I became more interested in political movements more generally, and their relations with the communities they strove to represent.
Looking at two provinces, Kazan and Baku, from the years immediately following the Great Reforms until the beginning of World War I, I examine the institutions and individuals responsible for mediating between the state and Muslim communities with respect to a variety of issues which were increasingly seen (by both the state and Muslim populations) as important to the Muslim communities of the two regions. I then look at how systems and practices of speaking in the community's name vis-a-vis state officials were upended by the Revolution of 1905 and the emergence of mass politics. After 1905, I examine divisions taking place over the question of who, if anyone, should speak in the name of Muslim communities, and at political coalitions which took place between Muslim and non-Muslim groupings. My study ends with an examination of how these developments contributed to the emergence of the Turkist (or "Pan-Turkist") movement in the Ottoman Empire.
Based upon research undertaken in archives and libraries in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Ufa, Simferopol, Baku, and Istanbul, this study employs a broad base of printed and handwritten sources in a variety of languages, including, among others, Russian, Arabic-script Tatar, Azeri Turkish, and Ottoman Turkish.
Journal Articles
In February of 2007, the International Journal of Middle East Studies published my article "Immigration, return, and the politics of citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1870-1914." In this article I use archival sources from the Crimea, Baku, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Istanbul to argue that, most of the time, tsarist authorities not only did not work to expel Muslims from Russia, but rather to the contrary struggled to keep them inside the empire. A second part of the article looks at the phenomenon of Muslims, particularly from the Crimea, returning to Russia and the response to this of tsarist officials. I then look at how the ambiguous "citizenship" ("subjecthood" would have been a better word) of Russian Muslims living in the Ottoman Empire often led to diplomatic tensions between the two states. Ultimately, my goal with this article was to show how states and subjects interacted in stretching the boundaries of subjecthood. When studying international relations, it's important to look not only at the relations between two governments, but also at how the people living in those states related to one another.
In February of 2009, an archive guide that I wrote appeared in the 2008/4 issue of the journal Ab Imperio. The guide is called "For the Russianist in Istanbul and the Ottomanist in Russia: A guide to the Archives of Eurasia." The idea for the guide arose in the aftermath of a workshop Sean Pollock organized during the course of our year-long Russia and Islam project at Columbia University's Harriman Institute (2007-2008). Sean asked me to write a piece on the types of source material that would be useful to a Russianist wishing to research in Istanbul.
Frankly, there isn't much that someone unschooled in Ottoman paleography could get out of the Ottoman archives. However, there are certain French-language documents in the Ottoman archives, particularly in the holdings of the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, which might be useful to a Russianist in Istanbul. And perhaps even more importantly, there are scores of materials that people with Turkic/Arabic/Persian skills would be able to access in the former USSR. So what I tried to do here was provide a kind of road map to people who are trans-imperial curious. For people who have received the technical training of an Orientalist but who are interested in perhaps making a foray into the former USSR, I discuss the holdings of libraries and archives in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Ufa, Simferopol, and Baku. For Russianists who would like to try their hand at managing the French-language materials in the Ottoman archives, I've also provided information which hopefully will prove useful to them.
My MA thesis at Princeton was entitled "Memory and Political Symbolism in Post-September 12 Turkey: A History of the May 27th Debate." The "September 12" in question refers to the military takeover of 1980, and "May 27th" refers to the military takeover of 1960, which prior to the 1980s had often been considered a "good" coup. I look at how opinions towards the "good" coup changed after the takeover of 1980 (which was particularly brutal), and--by extension--at the changing attitudes in Turkey regarding the military's role in politics.
Unfortunately I no longer have a digital copy of this thesis. However, it can be borrowed from the libraries of both Princeton and Brown.
Seminar Paper on Cyprus Conflict
In 2000, a paper I wrote for a class I was taking in international relations and diplomacy was posted on the personal webpage of the instructor, Ambassador Robert L. Hutchings, Assistant Dean and Lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The paper is entitled “Policy Watershed: Turkey’s Cyprus Policy and the Interventions of 1974.”
Review of A. Holly Shissler’s Between Two Empires: Ahmet Ağaoğlu and the New Turkey. The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, April, 2004, but this journal has apparently folded as I am no longer able to find a link to it online.
Also see book reviews and other academically-related writings posted on my blog.
When I was an MA student at Princeton I translated (from Turkish to English) an entry entitled Süleyman Gülşehri for the Encyclopaedia Iranica. It was approximately 500 words.
Newspaper/journal articles published prior to graduate school
When I was living in Turkey from 1992-1999 I published a number of opinion pieces in newspapers and journals, mostly about current events in Turkey. They're not bad, although some parts of these articles would definitely make me cringe if I were to read them today.
- “Turks Smell a Rat as Amnesty Quake Rocks Country”. New Europe, September 13-19, 1999.
- “Çiller, Refah and Susurluk: Turkey’s Troubled Democracy.” East European Quarterly, XXXII, No. 4, Winter, 1998.
- “The Macedonian Enigma.” South Slav Journal, Volume 19, Spring-Summer 1998.
- “Çiller’s Scandals.” Middle Eastern Quarterly, Volume IV, Number 3, September 1997.
- “Turkey, Greece and NATO’s Integrating Influence.” Turkish Daily News, August 5, 1997.
- “Noisy Nights in Turkey as Opposition Grows Louder.” New Europe, March 16-22, 1997.
- “Interpreting Turkey’s Elections.” New Europe, January 14-20, 1996.
- “The Screaming Man of Istiklal.” Balkan News (Athens, Greece), July 14, 1995.