Community in brief: Sebouh Aslanian, Fuat Dundar selected as post-doctoral fellows

Published: Saturday September 27, 2008

Sebouh Aslanian and Fuat Dundar have been selected as Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-doctoral Fellows for the 2008-2009 academic year, announced Prof. Gerard Libaridian, director of the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Mr. Aslanian defended his Ph.D. dissertation, "From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: Circulation and the Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan, 1605 to 1747," in the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 2007. The dissertation reassesses, in part, the usefulness of the "trade diaspora" paradigm for the study of long-distance merchant communities. Mr. Aslanian's doctoral thesis, awarded with distinction, was also selected as the best dissertation in the humanities at Columbia University and represented Columbia at a national competition in 2008. During the last academic year Mr. Aslanian was a visiting professor at Whitman College in the state of Washington.

During his tenure as a post-doctoral fellow, Mr. Aslanian plans to revise and complete a book manuscript for the University of California Press (World History Series), based on his dissertation. The Manoogian Simone fellowship will be crucial in allowing him to elaborate on two themes in his manuscript. The first theme is related to the early modern world of "trans-imperial cosmopolitanism." The second theme that he plans to elaborate further is also a paradox involving Julfan cosmopolitanism. "How is it possible," asks Mr. Aslanian, "for a merchant community whose cultural values were so thoroughly cosmopolitan to be among the first communities in the world to embrace what has now come to be seen as the parochializing logic of the nation-state?"

While at the University of Michigan, Dr. Aslanian will also teach one course per semester and deliver public lectures. During the fall semester, Dr. Aslanian plans to teach a course "The Indian Ocean in World History."

Among Mr. Aslanian's publications are "‘The Salt in a Merchant's Letter': The Culture of Julfan Correspondence in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean," Journal of World History?(Spring 2008) and "The ‘Treason of the Intellectuals'? Reflections on the uses of Revisionism and Nationalism in Armenian Historiography,"?Armenian Forum?(Spring 2002), pp. 1-37.

Fuat Dundar, originally from Turkey, completed his doctoral dissertation in 2007 at the École des Hautes Études?en?Sciences Sociales in Paris. His massive and original work, "The Ethnic Engineering of the Committee of Union and Progress and the Turkification of Anatolia (1913-1918), has already been published in Turkey (in Turkish); an English edition is being planned for 2009 in the United States.

Mr. Dundar's research while in Ann Arbor will address "Powers and Ethno-Statistics: Population Censuses as an Arena of Ethno Political Conflict from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic." The basic historical source for this study will be Ottoman and Turkish archival materials and statistical figures so that the instrumentalization of statistical data by the political power in the course of ethnic problems can be revealed. The study will scrutinize the population censuses, which were accomplished beginning from imperial period to the present day.

Mr. Dundar will teach one course during the Winter 2009 semester and deliver a number of public lectures.