Hazal Özdemir

Emptying the Ottoman landscape of non-Muslims was not only a project involving physical violence, but it was also a legal, bureaucratic, and archival endeavor. My first monograph, Undesirable Subjects: Armenian Transatlantic Mobility and the Cost of Ottoman Nationality, shows the meticulous effort of the government of Abdülhamid II to establish an empire-wide bureaucratic system to denaturalize emigrating Armenians and document their identities by creating a photographic database. It argues that the government enacted a population management project which brought emergent technologies of state surveillance and an exclusive conception of imperial subjecthood together. My second project illustrates the transformation of “abandoned land” from a legal classification of communal property to a marker of geographic and political loss in the Balkans. Focusing on how people lost their citizenship after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), it offers a new perspective on the transfer efforts prior to the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange.