Humanities Decanted: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Join us for a dialogue between Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (Global Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Hamed-Troyansky’s new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika.