Shared Histories of the Ottoman East | Yaşar Tolga Cora & Dzovinar Derderian

Ottoman History Podcast

E322 | This episode examines historical approaches to Armenians, Kurds, and Turks in the eastern provinces of Ottoman Anatolia. "Shared history" has been offered up as a corrective to the existing historiography's nationalist and often exclusionary approaches, but what does writing a "shared history" actually look like? Yaşar Tolga Cora and Dzovinar Derderian talk about their approaches in their recent 2016 edited volume, The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics. The volume discusses Trans-regional Connectivity; the fluidity of identities and loyalties, state and local politics; and the social history of space. They draw on the work to unpack the political and scholarly challenges of writing a "shared history" for an area that has been and still is marked by deep conflicts. More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/07/ottoman-east.html Yaşar Tolga Cora received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2016 and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Armenian Studies Program and History Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He focuses on the social history of Armenian communities in the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire before the Genocide. Dzovinar Derderian is a Ph. D. Candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation explores iterations of belonging to nation and empire through love, law and knowledge among Ottoman Armenians of Van in the mid-nineteenth century. Matthew Ghazarian is a Ph.D. Candidate in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, African Studies. His research focuses on the intersections of sectarianism, humanitarianism, and political economy in central and eastern Anatolia between 1856 and 1893. CREDITS Episode No. 322 Release Date: 1 July 2017 Recording Location: Boston, MA Audio editing by Matthew Ghazarian Music: Katibim (Üsküdar'a Gider iken) - Safiye Ayla and Baglamamin Dugumu - Necmiye Ararat and Muzaffer Images and bibliography courtesy of Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian, and Ohannes Kılıçdağı available at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/07/ottoman-east.html