Manoogian Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Armenian Studies
About
Cevat Dargın specializes in the modern history of the Middle East, with a focus on the transformation from indirect imperial to centralized nation-state rule through the lenses of environmental history across regimes changes and revolutions from the late eighteenth-century onwards, thereby challenging official narratives and conventional historiographies that treat such historical junctures as radical ruptures with the past. With a background in political science and Middle Eastern studies, Dr. Dargın integrates theoretical approaches from multiple disciplines and applies them to the study of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and environment through the histories of understudied and marginalized peoples and places in the peripheries and borderlands. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Mountains and the Modern State: An Environmental History of State-Making in the Middle East. The book explores the role of environmental factors in shaping the transition to modernity in state-making in the Middle East through the case of Dersim, a region in Eastern Anatolia with a rich and diverse natural environment and a predominantly Alevi Kurdish population. The project covers the period from the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 to the Turkish state’s violent transformation of the region in 1937–38. Dr. Dargın received his PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies in 2021.
