Dr. Talin Suciyan to Speak on Her New Book “Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces” At Fresno State

FRESNO — Dr. Talin Suciyan (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)) will give a presentation on “Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces” at 7:00PM on Tuesday, February 27, 2024, in the University Business Center, Alice Peters Auditorium, on the Fresno State campus.

This lecture will discuss the Ottoman Tanzimat era through the lenses of the Armenian Patriarchate Archives along with the Ottoman Archives. It will argue that while Tanzimat has long been portrayed as a progressive period that granted rights to all peoples of the empire, when in fact it set the mold for policies of oppression which pushed Armenians out of their native lands and would be reutilized time and again. Among the various forms of oppression described by 19th century Armenians from throughout the empire in the Patriarchate Archives, a prominent example is angarya, forced labor, which was demanded by the local authorities and power holders. Coupled with abusive and oppressive taxation policies instituted during the Tanzimat, Armenian peasants were turned into migrant workers; a phenomenon that heavily affected Armenian families in the provinces for the worse. This talk will demonstrate that forced labor coupled with abusive taxation was a tool of Ottoman temporal and territorial governance that continued to be implemented throughout the 20th century.

Dr. Talin Suciyan is Associate Professor (Privat Dozentin) of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces is her recently published second book, which was her habilitation thesis accepted by her home university LMU Munich in 2019. She received her doctoral degree in 2015 with her book The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, History and Politics (I. B. Tauris), which has been translated into Turkish (Aras Publ., 2018), German (De Gruyter, 2021) and will soon be released in Russian too.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Free parking is available, with a parking code provided at the lecture, in Fresno State Lot P6, near the University Business Center, 5245 N Backer Ave., Fresno State.

The presentation will also be live-streamed on YouTube at:  https://bit.ly/armenianstudiesyoutube.