Associate Professor
About
Biography:
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 research examines how crises such as famine, mass violence, and forced migration are understood, administered, and experienced in the modern Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. Her first monograph, The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2018), drew on previously unexamined archival materials to reconstruct the Ottoman home front and to demonstrate that famine and humanitarian relief were central to the experience of total war. Her second monograph, Scandals and Salvation: German Humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean (1896–1933), forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, extends this inquiry by analyzing how humanitarian action was organized, represented, and contested in the aftermath of mass violence, based on extensive German archival research. A series of articles and book chapters published in leading journals—including The American Historical Review, Humanity, the Journal of Genocide Research, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and First World War Studies—further develops this research across questions of visual representation, famine as slow violence, siege regimes, and the organization of refugee camps. Her future project, The Incarcerated Mediterranean, builds on this trajectory by examining how displacement is governed across interconnected maritime and coastal environments from the aftermath of the First World War to the present. Her collaborative projects explore how knowledge about violence is produced, embodied, and transmitted, alongside broader concerns about the politics of knowledge production and the fragility of academic freedom. In Survivor Archives of the Armenian Genocide: Affect, Embodiment, and Memory and In the Spirit of Chandler Davis: The Struggle for Academic Freedom and Social Activism, they examine how histories of violence persist through material and embodied traces and how academic freedom is contested across historical and contemporary contexts. Her work has been supported by major fellowships and grants, including awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as participation in a European Research Council Synergy Grant.
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:
““We Found Her at the River” German Humanitarian Fantasies and Child Sponsorship in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” The American Historical Review, 2024, 129(3), 889–918.
"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
