Programme

Day 1, 13 November

14:00 - 14:30 Check-in

14:30 - 15:00 Introduction

  • Yavuz Köse, Head of Department and Chair of Turkish Studies
  • Julia Fröhlich-Siegl & Özlem Sultan Çolak, organisers

15:00 - 17:00 Panel I: Individual Trajectories and Trans-national Connectivity 

Chair: Mariya Kiprovska, University of Vienna

  • Odile Moreau, Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University 

    Marginalized Voices of the Post-Ottoman Borderlands: Mohamed Bach Hamba’s Exile, Anti-Colonial Networks, and Transnational Memory (1913–1920)

  • Ayşan Sönmez, Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University

    Across Imperial Borderlands: Siranush and the Circulation  of  Theatre, Knowledge, and Female Agency between Istanbul and the South Caucasus

  • Varak Ketsamanian, American University of Beirut

    Boghos Shadigian (1874-1951) and a Microhistory of Armenian Revolutionism in Eurasian Borderlands

  • Osman Cihan Sert, Koç University alumnus

    Provisioning Sovereignty: The Daviço Household and Jewish Brokerage in Ottoman-Serbian Belgrade

17:00-17:30 Coffee break

17:30 - 19:00 Keynote / Book Presentation: Post-Ottoman Transitions: Borders, Mobility, and Contested Orders

  • Soumaya Louhichi (Heidelberg University)
    • including the book presentation of Post-Ottoman Transitions: Rethinking Nation-State Trajectories in the Arab and Turkish Contexts (2026, ed. Soumaya Louhichi and Jamal Barout)

19:00 - 20:30 Reception

Day 2, 14 November

8:45 - 9:00 Welcome & Coffee

9:00 - 11:00 Panel II: Smuggling, Illicit Mobility, and Nation-state Building

Chair: Grigor Boykov, University of Vienna

  • Dimitrios Mitsopoulos, Columbia University / M. Alison Frantz Fellow 2026-27, Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies 

    Contraband and Transition: Illicit Mobility in Macedonia and the Aegean, 1912–1918

  • Mitchell Bacci, Harvard University / Istanbul University 

    Contraband Continuities: Cannabis between Empire and Nation in the Late Ottoman and Interwar Eastern Mediterranean, 1876–1929

  • Savaş Dede, Istanbul Bilgi University 

    Kaçakçı or Kaçaxçî? Kinship, Mobility and Memory on the Turkey–Iraq Border, 1926–2011

  • Christopher Jotischky, Royal Holloway University, London 

    Nineteenth-century Greeks in the Mediterranean Slave Trade: Contingent and Fluid (Post-) Ottoman Identities

11:00 - 13:00 Panel III: Mobility, Memory, and Trans-national Belonging

Chair: Nanor Stepien, University of Vienna

  • Lidia Shahbazyan, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń 

    Negotiating Post-Otoman Legacies in a New Diaspora: Genocide Memory, Christanity, and Armenian Identty among Young Armenians in Poland

  • Nuran Gündüz, Free University of Berlin 

    Kourabiedes, Displacement, and Karamanlı Memory in Nea Karvali

  • Chen Gong, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China

    The Armenian Diaspora’s Effort to Return and Reclaim Land in Eastern Anatolia, 1908-1914: Struggles to Cross Seen and Unseen Borders

  • Konstantinos Sampanis, University of Vienna 

    Migration as Transgenerational Memory: Istanbul Greeks Narrating the Family Past

     

13:00 - 14:30 Lunch break

14:30 - 16:00 Panel IV: Emerging Borders: Migration, Property, and the State

Chair: Dimitris Kousouris, National Hellenic Research Foundation / Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences

  • Selvihan Kurt, Istanbul Technical University 

    Materializing Belonging: Abandoned Property, Museums, and the Making of Post-Ottoman Borderlands in İzmir

  • Hilal Tümer, University of California 

    From Atinalı to Moralı: Refugeehood, Property, and the Making of the Ottoman–Greek Border

  • Victoria Abrahamyan, UniDistance Switzerland

    Between Borders: Armenian Refugees, Mobility, and the Making of the Syrian Jazira Borderland, 1929–1935

16:00 - 16:30 Coffee break

16:30 - 18:00  Panel V: Negotiation of Borders and Resistance from Below

Chair: Yavuz Köse, University of Vienna

  • Antonis Nasis, CETOBaC (CNRS/EHSS/Collège de France) - Sciences Po Paris 

    Informal Agents, Imperial Rivalries during WWI: Female Espionage, Extraterritoriality and Information Networks in the Late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean

  • Muhammet Topal, University of Arizona 

    Across the Russo-Ottoman Border: Dagestani Mehmed Murad Bey’s Petition for Migration, and Family Reunification

  • Esin Gürbüz, Grenoble Alpes University

    From the Russian Occupation to the Treaty of Berlin: Strategies and Mobility of Non-Muslim Populations in the Balkans (1878–1882)

18:00 - 18:30 Wrap-up & Good-bye