Stanford Humanities Center
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East history at Florida State University. Her research centers on the questions of modern state-making, property regimes, and borderlands. Her scholarship stands at the junction of interconnected Ottoman, Kurdish, Armenian, and Turkish histories. She also writes about the question of methodology in Kurdish Studies. Her first manuscript, The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy, and Privilege (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) received the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s 2023 Book Prize.
SHC Project
Forging Empire: Mineral Extraction, State-Making, and the Colonization of Ottoman Kurdistan, 1720–1870
Forging Empire is a fiscal, environmental, and social history of mining in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the Keban-Ergani mines in the Kurdish- and Armenian-populated eastern frontier. Rich with copper, gold, and silver, these mines fueled the Imperial Mint and the Ottoman military for over a century. Forging Empire examines the transformations caused by pre-capitalist mining driven by the empire’s war needs. It shows that mining was pivotal in advancing Ottoman extractive colonialism in Kurdistan through economic exploitation, environmental damage, increased state control, and suppression of local autonomy. In this way, it reveals the intricate connection between mineral extraction, state formation, and colonialism in the Ottoman context.
Op-Eds
Kurdish Studies Journal: The Homeless Journal of an Orphan Field (2022)
Kurdology in Turkey: Barometer of the “Peace Process” (Part 1) (2020)
Kurdology in Turkey: Barometer of the “Peace Process” (Part 2)
The Discursive Power of Calls for Papers: Observations of an Ottoman-Kurdish Historian (2019).
Kurdish Studies in North America: Decolonizing a Field that Does Not Quite Exist, Yet? (2018)
Podcasts
Ottoman History Podcast: Privileges and Nobility in Ottoman Kurdistan
Turkey Book Talk: Nilay Özok-Gündoğan on Political Authority in Ottoman Kurdistan
