Hundreds of thousands of people born in the Ottoman Empire migrated to the United States from the late 19th century onward. After the First World War, two major changes in the relationship between the US and the Middle East occurred. First, the Ottoman Empire dissolved and broke into a number of nation-states and colonial mandates. Second, the US sought to drastically limit immigration from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. When Ottoman-born migrants entered the country illegally or were convicted of crimes, the US government often displayed vigor in efforts to deport them. But deporting someone back to a state that no longer existed became complicated. In this lecture, Chris Gratien shares the social, political, and legal dimensions of the stories of such people, which are the subject of a new investigative podcast project entitled "Deporting Ottoman Americans."

Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes about global environmental history and the modern Middle East. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Middle East. His current book project, The Mountains Are Ours: the Environmental History of a Late Ottoman Frontier, documents a century of migration, displacement, and agrarian change in the Cilicia region of Southern Anatolia between the 1850s and 1950s. He is also co-creator and producer of the Ottoman History Podcast, an internet radio program that since 2011 has featured more than 300 conversations with scholars and researchers concerning the history and culture of the Ottoman Empire, modern Middle East, and Islamic World.

Gratien also appears on “Digital Humanities and New Media Publication as Public Scholarship,” a roundtable of the Simpson Center’s project New Scholarly Practices, Broader Career Paths in Near & Middle Eastern Studies, at 3:30 pm on Friday, January 12, in Communications 202.