Tolga U. Esmer

He is a social and cultural historian who teaches courses on Ottoman, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Balkan history, as well as broader thematic fields such as comparative empire; the history of everyday life; gender and masculinity; the blurred lines between crime, corruption, and governance; the history of violence and state-building; social discontent and rebellion; Muslim–Christian relations; the history of emotions; and anthropological history. He has been teaching at CEU since Fall 2009. Prior to this, he taught courses on Islam and Islamic history at Northwestern University and Pennsylvania State University in the United States.

In terms of his research interests, he works on the imbrications of crime, corruption, and imperial governance and their broader implications for inter- and intra-confessional relations and nation-state formation in the Ottoman world and its successor states. Over the past several years, he has published a number of articles in journals such as Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The Journal of Ottoman Studies, and the European Journal of Turkish Studies.

He is currently completing a book entitled Economies of Violence: Tales of Banditry, Corruption, and Sovereignty in the Late Ottoman Empire (1790s–1820s). The book re-conceptualizes the phenomenon of banditry—central to narratives of disorder and disintegration that dominate the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states—by exploring how transregional networks of violence mediated social relations and brought together broad segments of society. It approaches banditry and its attendant economies of violence as politicized sites of contestation in which socio-economic, moral, legal, and religious concerns converged, highlighting new tensions and redefining social and political relations on the eve of national revolutions. These processes have often been studied separately in Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle Eastern historiography, yet the book demonstrates that they were deeply interconnected and mutually contingent.