Septembre 2026 à Juin 2027
La résidence de Ümit Kurt s'inscrit dans le cadre des résidences FIAS.
Ümit Kurt is a historian of the contemporary Middle East. His research focuses on the social, political, and economic history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He holds a PhD from Clark University and has held several postdoctoral positions at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Harvard University and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In 2024, he was appointed Dumanian Visiting Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
His work focuses in particular on mass violence, dispossession policies, and the social and economic transformations that accompanied the end of the Ottoman Empire. His book The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021) received the 2022 Dr Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He is co-editor of Paramilitary Violence in the Post-Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Mass Violence in the Post-Ottoman Lands (Bloomsbury, 2026). He was awarded the Barbro Klein Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in 2024 and the Junior Core Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of Central European University in 2025. He was also an Australian Research Council Fellow from 2022 to 2025. His forthcoming book, Biographies of Violence, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2027.
The Making of Violence: From Empire to Nation-State in the Middle East
This project examines the transformative dimensions of the mass violence perpetrated against the minorities of the Ottoman Empire—Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Greeks—as well as the historical impact and consequences of this history of violence on the Balkans and the Levant (Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon). It highlights in particular the decisive role played by international, inter-state, central, and regional actors in the processes of nation- and community-building within the Empire that ultimately led to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
The project seeks to renew the conventional historical narrative of the emergence of the post-Ottoman Middle East by placing mass violence within a broader, global perspective. In doing so, it provides essential insights into the contemporary conflicts that continue to shape the Balkans, the Near East, and the Middle East.
By closely examining the role of Ottoman policies, this research contributes to a better understanding of how the Empire’s diverse populations were able to coexist for centuries before becoming caught up in dynamics of violence, alternately becoming perpetrators and victims. In doing so, it sheds light on the processes that led to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and on the events that laid the foundations for conflicts that continue to shape the region today.
The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide, co-authored with Taner Akçam (New York: Berghahn Press, 2015).
“Genocide as Patriotic Work Ethic: A Critical Reading of Mustafa Reşat (Mimaroğlu)’s Memoirs” in Die Welt des Islam (International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam), vol. 65, no. 4 (2025): 440-475.
“1923 and the Legacies of Genocide” in History Compass 22, issue 4 (2024), 1-9.
“The Fate of the Armenian and Greek Properties in the Post-First World War Period (1920-1922)” in Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 26, no. 2 (2024), 164-82.
