Hybrid lecture by Talin Suciyan, Associate Professor of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Room 10383 (10th floor)
315 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, 90095

This lecture will discuss the pivotal Ottoman era of Tanzimat not just through use of the Ottoman Archives, but also a far less known but just as important source, that of the Armenian Patriarchate. It will argue how unlike Tanzimat’s reputation for reform and the promotion of rights, it actually set into motion a process from the first half of the 19th century which disenfranchised Armenians in every respect and set the foundation for the policies of governance throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These archival sources demonstrate how the Armenians of the era faced abusive and oppressive taxation, forced labor, kidnapping of their women, migrant work, and forceful deportations, practices which were in fact fostered by Tanzimat’s policies. While they occurred throughout the empire, this talk will particularly focus on villages of the coastal Cilicia region, as it is one of this period’s least researched areas. It is through the smallest units, namely the lives of Armenian peasants in their villages during Tanzimat, that the true effects of Ottoman temporal and territorial policies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries are brought into focus.

Talin Suciyan is Associate Professor (Privat Dozentin) of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces is her recently published second book, which was her habilitation thesis accepted by her home university LMU Munich in 2019. She received her doctoral degree in 2015 with her book The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, History and Politics (I. B. Tauris), which has been translated into Turkish (Aras Publ., 2018), German (De Gruyter, 2021) and soon will be released in Russian too. Her research focuses on Ottoman inter-communal relations, Armenian ecclesiastical law, labor, gender, peasantry, Armenian literature of the Ottoman provinces, and medical practices of the 19th and 20th century Middle East.

Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Armenian Genocide Research Program, Center for Near Eastern Studies, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, Ararat-Eskijian Museum