The Program in Agrarian Studies Colloquium presents
Matthew Ghazarian, postdoctoral associate, Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University:
“Precarities of Plenty: Ottoman Famine and the Ecology of Debt.”
Matthew Hagop Ghazarian works on social history, political economy, and political ecology in the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and an A.B. in Government from Harvard University. His current research focuses on ethnic divides, rural life, and famine in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Following new social visions in tandem with re-organizations of food, capital, and land, his work traces their interplay at key moments to show how rigid notions of social difference gained currency among rural people. His work brings together social, economic, and environmental history to explain the development of these increasingly conflict-prone social categories, which would become the fault lines for violence and partition at the end of empire.
Ghazarian’s other work has examined marriage, sex, and violence in the late Ottoman Empire as well as histories of technology and infrastructure in the neighboring South Caucasus. He has also been a member of the editors collective of Ottoman History Podcast since 2015 and has produced episodes in English and Turkish on topics ranging from Ottoman history, Islamic thought, Armenian Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. He has taught in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Armenian Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Program on Environmental Science & Policy at Smith College.