Hazal Özdemir
2025-26 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian History
Research interests: Migration and mobility, displacement, subjecthood and citizenship, photography, surveillance, archiving, empires.
Hazal Özdemir is a historian of migration, displacement, and law in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East. Her dissertation reconstructs late Ottoman policies of denaturalization and shows how surveillance methods devised to control the mobility of a population, including a photographic archive, were a crucial part of a broad repertoire of state governance aimed at the Armenian community. She studies unbecoming an Ottoman and explores the bureaucratic and legal steps the late Ottoman government took to curtail the relatively fluid notion of imperial belonging predating the more exclusionary idea of nation-state membership. Hazal received her PhD in History at Northwestern University in May 2024. She holds a BA in History from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and an MA in History of Art with Photography from Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD dissertation was funded by institutions such as the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS).
