POSTDOC VLADIMIR HAMED-TROYANSKY AWARDED 2018 WORLD HISTORY ASSOCIATION PRIZE
Thursday, March 7, 2019
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s dissertation, “Imperial Refuge: Resettlement of Muslims from Russia in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914,” won the 2018 World History Association Dissertation Prize, annually awarded for the best doctoral dissertation in world, global, or transnational history.
At Harriman, Vladimir is writing his book manuscript, which is based on his dissertation. The book explores the immigration of about a million Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus to the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and Syria. These refugees transformed not only the Ottoman Empire’s demographics but also regional economies and labor markets. The book rewrites late Ottoman history through the lens of refugee resettlement and argues that refugees’ ability to tap into local economies, aided by the government’s support, underpinned regional and imperial stability in the Middle East and the Balkans. For this project, Vladimir has consulted Ottoman Turkish and Arabic sources in a dozen public and private archives in Turkey, Jordan, and Bulgaria and has worked with Russian imperial records in archives in Moscow, Vladikavkaz, Nalchik, Makhachkala, Tbilisi, and Baku.
Vladimir also recently won two prizes for his article, “Circassian Refugees and the Making of Amman, 1878–1914,” published in International Journal of Middle East Studies. His article received the 2018 Best Article Prize from the Syrian Studies Association and the 2018 Khayrallah Prize in Middle Eastern Migration Studies from the Mose A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.
