Cevat Dargın is a historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa. He explores intersectional historical processes among race, territory, and technology that reinvented governance in these regions and the larger world during the Age of High Imperialism, from the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s to the aftermath of World War I and into the interwar period. This is the period during which the political landscape in many parts of the world transitioned from indirect imperial to centralized nation-state rule, with profound implications for today.
Dr. Dargın holds the position of Visiting Professorship in Armenian Studies at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Before coming to Columbia, he earned his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Princeton University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Among his other publications, his article titled “Anticipatory Historical Geographies of Violence: Imagining, Mapping and Integrating Dersim into the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish State, 1866–1939” was recently featured in the Journal of Historical Geography. Currently, he is working on several projects, including his book manuscript which explores the formation of the modern state at the intersection of race, territory, and technology in the late Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman territories.