Zozan Pehlivan

I am an environmental historian specializing in the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Kurdistan. My research and teaching concentrate on the history of environments, violence, comparative empires, grassland ecologies, animals, and pastoralists. 

My first book, The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024), examines the outcomes of recurrent global climate fluctuations in the nineteenth century and related Ottoman policies on pastoralists. By analyzing the impact of climate change on the deterioration of limited natural resources—including water, pastures, and animals—the book highlights how the scarcity of these material conditions contributed to the rise of struggles among people and ethnoreligious tensions between Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and Christian Armenian peasants on the eve of the Great War. 

I currently hold the position of the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair on Violence. Previously, I have received numerous awards for my interdisciplinary research, including recognition from the Institute of Historical Research (2011), the American Society for Environmental History (2018), and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021). I served as the McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (2021-2023) and held fellowships at the Newberry Library in Chicago (2023-2024) and the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City (2025). In 2019, I was honored with the Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association's Ömer Lütfi Barkan Article Prize for my article “El Niño and the Nomads” (2020). 

Currently, I am working on my second book, “Resettler Empires: How Americans, Britons, and the Ottomans Conquered Grasslands.” This project investigates imperial responses to environmental stress from 1830 to 1930, analyzing the relationships between climate change, state policies, dispossession, violence, and the criminalization of Indigenous populations. It offers a comparative study of forced sedentarization (iskan in Turkish) and migration of herding communities across various environmental and political contexts. Using case studies from the Great Plains, Frontier Punjab, and Ottoman Kurdistan, the project explores how American, British, and Ottoman imperial powers consolidated control over herding territories.

Since 2018, I am also been 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," directed by Prof. Gwyn Campbell at McGill University.