Melanie S. Tanielian

Melanie S. Tanielian is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the Director of the Program for International and Comparative Studies. Her monograph The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid and World War I in the Middle East tells how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how it sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities. It examines the wartime famine's reverberations throughout the community: in Beirut's municipal institutions, in its philanthropic and religious organizations, in international agencies, and in the homes of the city's residents. Tanielian is a historian of war and society, and her research and teaching interests include the social and cultural history of WWI in the Middle East, the emergence of religious philanthropic societies and their work in times of conflict, the histories of modern humanitarianism. She is currently working on a new book, Fantasies of Humanitarianism/Humanitarian Fantasies: Germany and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1896-1933 (under contract with Cambridge University Press), and is concurrently conducting research for my third monograph, preliminarily titled: Transnational Lunacy: Madness, Society, and Citizenship in a World at War, 1914-1919, as well as is co-editing a volume titled Afterlives: Remnants, Ruins, and Representations of the Armenian Genocide. Her most recent research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Selected publications

Monographs:

The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Articles:

"Defying the Humanitarian Gaze: Visual Representation of Genocide Survivors in the Eastern Mediterranean," Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 14, no. 2 (2023).

 The Silent Slow Killer of Famine: Humanitarian Management and Permanent Security, Journal of Genocide Research, 2024 DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2024.2310866

"Feeding the City: The Beirut Municipality and Civilian Provisioning During World War I,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 46 (2014), 737-758.

“Politics of Wartime Relief in Ottoman Beirut,” in First World War Studies, 5 (2014): 69-82.

“Food and Nutrition (Ottoman Empire/Middle East),” in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-8.

“Disease and Public Health (Ottoman Empire/Middle East),” in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-8

“A Taste of Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut” by Toufoul Abou-Hodeib,” American Historical Review, (2018) 123 (2): 666-668.

"The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria" by Benjamin Thomas White," English Historical Review, (2015) 130 (547): 1602-1604.

"Review of Haugbolle, Sune, War, and Memory in Lebanon." H-Levant, H-Net Reviews. October 2010.

Affiliation(s)

• History
• Armenian Studies Program
• Program in International and Comparative Studies

Field(s) of Study

• Social and cultural history of the modern Middle East
• War, violence and human rights
• Early 20th-century Lebanon
• Human Rights and Humanitarianism