Dr. Ozan Ozavci is Associate Professor of transimperial history. The main focus of his research is on global north-south relations, particularly in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, analyzing imperial military, legal, financial, and health interventions and cooperation since the late eighteenth century.

In 2023, Dr Ozavci started a new project on global north-south public health cooperation. Funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant (€2m), the Dutch Research Council Open Competition M and the Gingko Library (€360k), his new research considers the preconditions for effective localised sanitary internationalism in the Middle East and North Africa. It remaps the trajectory of global public health diplomacy by examining the international sanitary councils established in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and Persia.

In his previous work, he explored the genealogy and diverse layers of foreign armed interventions in civil wars in the Middle East. His second monograph Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars, 1798-1864 (Oxford University Press, 2021, paperback 2024) has been recognised by historians as a “major contribution” that “defines the state of the art” in diplomatic history, “set[ting] new standards in how future scholars should read diplomatic relations in the larger European context.”

 

 

Dr Ozavci's third monograph The Invention of the Eastern Question: Sir Robert Liston and Ottoman Diplomacy in the Age of Revolutions  will be published by Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris in 2025. It explains how the Russian invasion of the Crimea changed world history at the turn of the nineteenth century by triggering the most dangerous, complex and enduring issue in nineteenth-century international politics: the Eastern Question. 

Dr Ozavci is co-founder of The Lausanne Project, which is a forum for scholarly research and public outreach on the relations of MENA with the rest of the world. In 2023, he co-edited (together with Jonathan Conlin) a volume titled They All Made Peace - What’s Peace? The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order (Gingko) that brings together top historians to re-narrate the history of the Lausanne Peace Conference and the world around it. The Lausanne Project’s programmes include fortnightly publication of blog posts and podcasts, exhibitions, online galleries as well as a teaching package for high school teachers and students in Greece and Turkey. 

 

 

In 2024, Dr Ozavci co-authored the graphic novel De la lumière a l’ombre together with Julia Secklehner and Jonathan Conlin. The novel presents the history of peace-making in the inter-war period through the lens of Hacivat and Karagöz, characters from a shadow puppet theatre, whose story offers a blend of entertainment and thoughtful reflection on the Lausanen moment. The graphic novel will be published in Turkish, Greek and English in the coming years.

 

 

Dr Ozavci initiated and co-founded the Security History Network in 2022 together with Beatrice de Graaf and Erik de Lange. The three published a jointly edited book in 2024 titled Securing Empire: Imperial Cooperation and Competition in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury). Besides these activities, Dr. Ozavci has been a member of the Decolonisation Group, served as a core member of the inter-faculty Contesting Governance Platform, and was part of the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee within the Faculty of Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom and at the Centre for Global Challenges at Utrecht University. He has also been an associate member of the Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques in Paris since 2015.