Hazal Özdemir

Hazal Özdemir is a legal and social historian of the late Ottoman Empire, with a focus on migration and belonging. Her research and teaching interests include transnational histories of migration and refugees, citizenship, photography and archives, and minorities in the modern Middle East. Her work primarily focuses on how imperial governance and the mobility of marginalized ethnoreligious communities shaped one another. She explores how Ottoman migration policies eliminated Christian subjects, and how the movement of these populations, in turn, redefined the boundaries of legal belonging. Hazal is currently working on her first monograph, which shows how the late Ottoman government saw outbound, temporary labor migration as an opportunity to uproot Armenians. The book traces how migration policies targeting Armenians obscured the lines between renunciation of subjecthood and denaturalization, and between voluntary migration and forced displacement. Hazal holds a BA in History from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and an MA in History of Art with Photography from Birkbeck, University of London. Her first book project was funded by institutions such as the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS). Her second project provides a more comprehensive history of the monumental Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, through a focus on the relationship between land tenure and citizenship in the post-Ottoman world.