Education

Ph.D., History - Georgetown University, 2015
M.A., Arab Studies - Georgetown University, 2008
B.A., History - Le Moyne College, 2005

Publications

Environmental History

My first published monograph entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022) explores the history of the late Ottoman countryside through the social and environmental transformation of the Adana region and its vast littoral plain known as Çukurova. Located at the modern-day border between Turkey and Syria, Çukurova was a sparsely populated littoral plain at the beginning of the 19th century. The lowlands served primarily as winter pasture for nomadic pastoralists, and the surrounding mountains of the Taurus and Amanus ranges in turn provided summer pasture and supported large village populations. The largest cities in the region, Adana and Tarsus, boasted urban populations in the tens of thousands, a small fraction of the predominantly pastoralist and agriculturalist inhabitants. By the middle of the 20th century, Çukurova was the core of a rapidly urbanizing region dominated by commercial agriculture in which pastoralists had been pushed to the absolute margins. In The Unsettled Plain, I argue that the historical experience of Çukurova was in many ways emblematic of how the modern state, capitalism, war, and science impacted rural society in the Ottoman Empire. I study how the local ecology of the region changed with the rise of commercial cotton cultivation, mass migration and displacement, and the introduction of new forms of technology and medicine. Malaria is the theme that runs throughout the five chapters spanning from the medieval period to the present, with a focus on the century between the 1850s and 1950s. A mosquito-borne illness, malaria had a long presence in the region, but I argue that its modern manifestation was an artifact of rural dispossession.