Postdoctoral Fellow Lecture. “They Vowed Never to Return:” Armenian Transatlantic Mobility and Abandoned Ottomans

Abstract: This lecture reconstructs late Ottoman policies of denaturalization and shows how a photographic archive devised to control the mobility of a population was a crucial part of a broad repertoire of state efforts aiming at shaping Armenian transatlantic mobility at the end of the Ottoman Empire. It focuses on the Hamidian era – the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) – and how empire-wide bureaucratic networks collaborated to label Armenians as undesirable subjects and prevent migrants’ return to the empire. It argues that the meticulous efforts on the part of the Ottoman state to document the identities of emigrating Armenians through a photographic archive represent a significant example of how the emergent technologies of state surveillance contributed to an exclusive conception of imperial subjecthood. Photography and archiving became engines of state-building and ethnonational ideology. Building on my dissertation research, this talk also introduces my second project, which explores the new demarcations of imperial belonging, and the changing anxieties and vocabularies for managing imperial security during the Balkan Wars and World War I. I investigate how enemy aliens, and people from the lost territories in the Balkans were photographed and expatriated. I will discuss the terms deportation and abandonment and demonstrate that emptying the Ottoman landscape of undesirable people was not only a political and bureaucratic project, but also a visual and archival one.

Bio: Hazal Özdemir received her PhD in History at Northwestern University in May 2024. She is the 2024-2025 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the 2025-2028 Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Population, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Hazal holds a BA in History from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and an MA in History of Art with Photography from Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD dissertation was funded by institutions such as the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS).

Register here: https://umich.zoom.us/j/92067651635