Bogdan Pavlish
2024-2025 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in Armenian History
Research interests: Armenian diaspora; translation and mobility; Catholic missions; Baroque; microhistory; historiography and anthropology; material culture.
Bogdan Pavlish is a historian of early modern Eastern Europe whose research focuses on the Armenians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He earned his PhD in history from Northwestern University in 2024. His dissertation, entitled ‘Nothing Exotic but Ourselves: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Armenian Diaspora of Poland-Lithuania in the Seventeenth Century,’ examines the role of the Armenian communities of Lviv and other towns of present-day Ukraine in cultural, commercial, and diplomatic exchanges between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Bogdan is currently working on his first book project, which explores themes of distance, difference, and translation at the intersection of the early Armenian diaspora, Catholic missionization, and multicultural societies of Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century. His research draws on primary sources in several languages from archives and libraries in Ukraine, Poland, the Vatican, and Armenia. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Early Modern History and Ab Imperio.
Hazal Özdemir
2024-2025 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).
