Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 7:30 pm Eastern / 4:30 pm Pacific
On Zoom and the NAASR YouTube channel Armenian Studies.

GUEST SPEAKER
HAZAL ÖZDEMIR, Gulbenkian Fellow (2022-2023) and PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University

This talk will expand the category of anti-Armenian violence in the Hamidian era to contain the denaturalization of targeted populations and methods devised to control their movements, such as photo registers. It will focus on the Armenian mobility between the Ottoman Empire and the United States between 1896-1908. In 1896, the government of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) encouraged Armenians who were bound to the United States to emigrate under the condition that they renounce their Ottoman subjecthood, vow to never return, and deliver their two photographs to the state. Creating a bureaucratic apparatus for monitoring and policing the transatlantic mobility of Armenians, who had become undesirable subjects was a crucial phase of state-sanctioned violence. Armenian denaturalization was also a pivotal step in the transition from the empire to the nation-state and this ethnoreligious discrimination profoundly shaped Ottoman nationality and the formation of Turkish citizenship.

Hazal Özdemir is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Northwestern University. Before coming to Northwestern, she graduated from Boğaziçi University’s Department of History in 2017 and received her master's degree in the History of Art and Photography program at Birkbeck, University of London. Her dissertation project is funded by institutions such as the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) and the Society of Armenian Studies (SAS). Hazal is a Gulbenkian Fellow for the academic year 2022-2023.

CO-SPONSORS
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
Society for Armenian Studies (SAS)