Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Matthew Ghazarian "Precarities of Plenty: Ottoman Famine and the Ecology of Debt"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.
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Matthew Hagop Ghazarian works on social history, political economy, and political ecology in the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. He is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. from Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and an A.B. in Government from Harvard University. His current research focuses on ethnic divides, rural life, and famine in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Following new social visions in tandem with re-organizations of food, capital, and land, his work traces their interplay at key moments to show how rigid notions of social difference gained currency among rural people. His work brings together social, economic, and environmental history to explain the development of these increasingly conflict-prone social categories, which would become the fault lines for violence and partition at the end of empire.

Ghazarian’s other work has examined marriage, sex, and violence in the late Ottoman Empire as well as histories of technology and infrastructure in the neighboring South Caucasus. He has also been a member of the editors collective of Ottoman History Podcast since 2015 and has produced episodes in English and Turkish on topics ranging from Ottoman history, Islamic thought, Armenian Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. He has taught in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Armenian Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Program on Environmental Science & Policy at Smith College.