Personal Page UU

Ugur Ümit Üngör (1980) gained his Ph.D. in 2009 (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008-09, he was Lecturer in International History at the Department of History of the University of Sheffield, and in 2009-10, he was Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies of University College Dublin. Currently he is Lecturer at the Department of History at Utrecht University and at the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.

His main areas of interest are state formation and nation formation, with a particular focus on mass violence. These interests necessitate a commitment to inter-disciplinarity at the intersections of social science and history. His most recent publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum, 2011) and the award-winning The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Apart from his academic life, Ugur writes satirical columns and essays about cosmopolitan life on and across political and cultural boundaries. His essays offer an attempt at placing current global issues and themes in serious and ironic perspectives.

I am currently writing a book on the genocidal crisis during the collapse of the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. It will be a study of the continuum of political violence from the Balkans to Anatolia into the Caucasus, from 1912 to 1923. It will explore the impact of war and genocide on the peoples of the Ottoman and Russian empires as they collapsed at the end of the First World War. It will investigate how war as inter-state violence ricocheted into the imperial borderlands and generated intra-state violence. More specifically, the book will highlight the processes of violence, launched by sub-state actors such as paramilitary groups. The book will discuss that the crisis at the end of World War I was a central part of a wider context of crisis in the peripheries of Russia and Turkey. It will argue that (and how) the three conflicts in 1912-1923 were continuous and interrelated. The violence engendered in the Balkan wars traveled to Anatolia, and the experience of mass murder there in turn spurned more violence in the Caucasus in years to come. In other words, this comprehensive perspective will depart from a historiography that tends to study these acts of mass violence in isolation from one another.

In the current academic year 2012-2013, I will be teaching the following course: