Melanie Tanielian

Melanie S. Tanielian is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Director of the Program for International and Comparative Studies. Her research examines war, famine, humanitarian aid, and mass violence in the modern Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. She is the author of The Charity of War and the forthcoming Scandals and Salvation. Her articles, published in journals including The American Historical Review, Humanity, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, examine famine as slow violence, humanitarian politics, and its visual representations. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Tanielian will complete her monograph, Scandal and Salvation: German Humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1890–1930, a history of German aid to Armenians. The book studies how humanitarianism became a medium for navigating geopolitical marginality, moral authority, and post-imperial identity. It reframes humanitarianism as an unstable, affectively charged, and historically contingent form of global engagement shaped by scandal, salvation, and the ruins of empire.