Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908
CSEES
UNI GRAZ
visiting lecture
Location:
Resowi, LS 15.02
Date:
Thursday, 26 January, 2017 – 17:00 to 19:00
Speaker(s):
İpek K. Yosmaoğlu
Description:
İpek K. Yosmaoğlu (PhD Princeton, 2005) is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before joining the faculty at Northwestern University in 2010, where she is an Associate Professor of History. Her research and teaching interests include nationalism, political violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Her research has been supported by the Onassis Foundation, the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the National Endowment for the Humanities and American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is currently a senior Lise Meitner fellow at the University of Graz, Karl-Franzens, working on a new project about the Jewish community of Thrace in from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire to early Republican Turkey.
Her lecture on Thursday will be based on her first monograph, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908, (Cornell University Press, 2014). Based on research in several archives in Turkey, France, and Greece, the book is an analysis of the transition from a religion-based understanding of collective identity to one based on national affiliation among the Christian rural population of Ottoman Macedonia. Yosmaoglu argues that violence was the most important catalyst in this process: it created national identities where they did not exist before. In other words, violence was the cause, rather than the consequence of national differentiation.