For the first time, a Queen's History PhD has won an international book prize for Middle Eastern Studies:
Zozan Pehlivan -- University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) Department of History faculty was awarded the Ottoman and Turkish Studies 2025 Book Award, announced at the last Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting (held in late November 2025 in Washington, D.C.) for Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century (Cambridge, 2024) that is based on a dissertation completed in our department under the supervision of Dr. Ariel Salzmann.
The award is given to what the committee considers to be the best book in the previous year in the fields of either Ottoman or Turkish studies, published in English. Nominees represent institutions in North America, Europe, Japan, and Turkey/the Middle East with topics ranging from late Medieval to Modern period.
According to OTSA's award committee:
Zozan Pehlivan’s The Political Ecology of Violence is a groundbreaking study of late Ottoman Kurdistan. Through a unique methodology that brings meteorological data, immunological knowledge, and cross-cultural ethnographies in conversation with archival documents and other historical sources, Pehlivan offers a bold re-reading of deteriorating intercommunal relations between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists that are typically interpreted through ethno-religious frameworks alone. Instead, Pehlivan’s book makes the case for a thorough socio-material and environmental reading of the escalating violence that would eventually take on genocidal proportions. Far from drawing on any primordial hatred, intercommunal violence in Eastern Anatolia thus drew on a deadly combination of climate change, environmental crises, and state policy. With its innovative methodology and copious archival sources in several languages, The Political Ecology of Violence will have a lasting impact on our thinking about the history of communal violence, land regimes, and human-animal relations. It constitutes a masterful example for how to creatively combine historical sources with comparative ethnographic material as well as veterinary and meteorological data to yield bold new insights into long-standing historical debates. It also contributes to a growing body of scholarly literature on the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, adding to our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the region. The book makes a compelling case for the importance of environmental history that will no doubt resonate widely, and constitutes a timely reminder of the inextricable entanglement of our human lives with the land we inhabit and the non-human others we share it with.
