Matthew Ghazarian

Matthew Ghazarian is a Ph. D. candidate in Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), where he works on Ottoman social and economic history. His dissertation focuses on sectarianism, humanitarianism, and how they unfolded as concepts and practices in nineteenth-century Anatolia, examining this question through the lens of famine, disease, and other hardships. This project explores the ways “intervening” actors like local authorities, state bureaucrats, and foreign missionaries created material conditions and institutions that affected the politicization of Ottoman religious categories between 1856 and 1893. As the Ottoman Empire grappled with the ramifications of its newly-declared religious equality in 1856, how did discourses of equality and political belonging coexist with – or even make possible – divisive and exclusionary politics that have persisted to the present? His dissertation seeks to address these questions by examining how changing political discourses and newly-founded institutions affected relations among Armenians, Kurds, Turks, and others.