Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky will present on his book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024), which reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Between the 1850s and World War I, the Ottoman Empire welcomed about a million Muslim refugees from Russia.  Empire of Refugees, examines how Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, and other refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and how the Ottoman government managed Muslim refugee resettlement. North Caucasians established hundreds of villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Empire of Refugees demonstrates that the Ottoman government created a refugee regime that predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. It offers a new way to think about migration and displacement in the Middle East. Grounded in archival research in ten countries, this book examines the migration of about a million Muslim refugees from Russia to the Ottoman Empire and rewrites the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Based on research in over twenty archives in ten countries, the book explores the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir is currently writing a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.