Zozan Pehlivan

I am an environmental historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Kurdistan. My research and teaching focus on the history of environments, violence, comparative empires, animals, and pastoralists. My first book monograph, The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (Cambridge University Press, Spring 2024) examines the outcome of recurrent nineteenth-century global climate fluctuations and related Ottoman policies on pastoralists. By focusing on the impacts of climate change on the deterioration of limited natural resources, my book charts the importance of material conditions on the rise of ethnoreligious tensions between Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and Christian Armenian peasants on the eve of the Great War. 

My interdisciplinary research has been awarded by many institutions, including the Institute of Historical Research (2011), the American Society for Environmental History (2018), and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021), and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (2021-2023). I am also a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award and my article “El Niño and the Nomads” (2020) was awarded the Ömer Lütfi Barkan Article Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. For the 2023-2024 academic year, I will be a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. At Newberry, I will work on my second book monograph, tentatively titled Empires of Sedentarization: How Americans and Ottomans Conquered Grasslands, examining imperial responses to environmental stress during the modern era (1830-1930). This project analyzes the relationship between climate change, state policies, dispossession, violence, and criminalization of Indigenous populations, and proposes a comparative study of forced sedentarization (iskan in Turkish) and migration of herding communities between diverse environmental and political contexts. Taking as case studies the Great Plains and Ottoman Kurdistan, the project examines the ways in which American and Ottoman imperial powers consolidated control in areas inhabited by the herders. 

I am 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."