“Empire of Refugees: Muslim Migration from Russia to the Middle East,”
a lecture by
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
206 Ingraham Hall
April 11, 2024 @ 4:00 pm – 5:15 pm
This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, co-sponsored by Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies & Middle East Studies Program
About the Lecture: Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million Muslims from the Russian Empire’s Caucasus region sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. In his new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky examines how Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, and other refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and how the Ottoman government managed Muslim refugee resettlement. Empire of Refugees argues that, in response to Muslim migrations from Russia, the Ottoman government created a refugee regime, which predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. The book also revises our understanding of how Russia used migration policies to govern the Caucasus and its Muslim populations.
About the Speaker: Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Based on research in over twenty archives in ten countries, the book explores the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir is currently writing a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.