Overview
Ayşe Polat is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society for the Humanities and Lecturer at Near East Studies at Cornell University. She is a legal and social historian of the Ottoman Empire, specialising in law, migration, and race in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sakip Sabanci Center in Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections of maritime and urban history, histories of slavery and forced migration, humanitarianism, and human rights law. Her teaching is informed by her research, providing a critical survey on the history of border regimes, migration governance, and humanitarian practices in the Mediterranean and MENA region.
Research Focus
As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Polat will finish her book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation, titled ‘The Pale of Humanity: Fugitivity and Carceral Humanitarianism in the Ottoman Mediterranean, 1860-1920’. This book explores the legal tenets and political economy of humanitarian practices in the late Ottoman Mediterranean. From refugee settlement schemes to forced sedentarisation, anti-slavery activism and labour conscription, the humanitarian arms of the late Ottoman Empire served the ends of ‘civilising’ and thus, restructuring political society. This book reimagines the story of imperial humanitarianism from the perspectives of its victims: reluctant settlers, fugitive slaves, and stateless Armenians. It provides a fugitive’s perspective on questions surrounding carcerality, freedom, and movement. In doing so, it traces the racial striations of the late Ottoman society, between the descent of the Empire and the ascent of many nations.
