Nazan Maksudyan is Einstein guest professor at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin and a research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin). She was a “Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe” (EUME) Fellow in 2009-10 at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) in 2010-11 and in 2016-18. From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a professor of history in Istanbul and received her habilitation degree in 2015. Her research mainly focuses on the history of children and youth in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special interest in gender, sexuality, education, humanitarianism, and non-Muslims.
Among her publications, Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse University Press, 2014) is one of the pioneering contributions to the social history of children and youth in the Ottoman Empire. Her edited volume, Women and the City, Women in the City (Berghahn, 2014), provided an under-researched gendered lens to Ottoman urban history. Her recent book, Ottoman Children and Youth During World War I (Syracuse University Press, 2019) adds a new dimension to the historiography of the war by exploring the variegated experiences and involvement of Ottoman children and youth.
She has also published numerous articles on the social history children and youth, gender, and non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. Some examples are “Orphans, Cities, and the State: Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and ‘Reform’ in the Late Ottoman Urban Space” (2011); “Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire,” (2008); “Agents or Pawns? Nationalism and Ottoman Children during the Great War” (2016); “The Armenian Genocide and Survival Narratives of Children” (2019).
Maksudyan is among the founders of the Association of Middle East Children’s and Youth Studies (AMECYS) and she serves on the Board of Directors (2017-2019). She is also one of the Managing Editors of the “1914-1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War.”
