Zozan Pehlivan (University of Minnesota), “A Climate of ‘Slow Violence’ in the Late Ottoman Empire” (Yale Agrarian Studies)

Event time: 
Friday, February 12, 2021 - 11:00am to 1:00pm
Location: 
Please email agrarian.studies@yale.edu in order to receive online meeting information See map
Event description: 

Zozan Pehlivan is an environmental historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Kurdistan whose research and teaching focus on the history of environments, comparative empires, animals, and pastoralists. She received her Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario where her dissertation was awarded an “honorable mention” in 2015-16 dissertation prize competition for its original contribution to the fields of environmental and Middle Eastern historiography. Before joining the University of Minnesota, she held a two-year fellowship at the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) of McGill University, Montréal, Quebec. Dr. Pehlivan is a 2019-2020 Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellow. Her current book monograph project, entitled “A Climate of Violence: Environmental Crises in late Ottoman Empire”, explores the integral role of environmental factors in inter communal violence between Muslim Kurdish herders and Christian Armenian peasants in the late Ottoman Empire. Dr. Pehlivan is also a “collaborator” on a 7-year, $2.5 million SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) Partnership Grant for the project “Appraising risk, past and present: Interrogating historical data to enhance understanding of environmental crises in the Indian Ocean World.” The project aims to investigate six periods of historical and contemporary environmental (e.g. climate change, volcanism, monsoons, cyclones, drought) and human (e.g. famine, disease, conflict, migration) crisis, in order to elucidate past-to-to-present patterns that will help inform current and future risk preparedness and socio-human responses to environmental crises and disasters in the Indian Ocean world.