DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Middle Eastern and North African History; Modern European History: Central/Eastern Europe; Global History

Thematic Field(s):  War and Empire in History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Nationalism, War and Society, Political Violence, Genocide

Biography

İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu (Ph.D., Princeton, 2005) is a historian of the Ottoman Empire.  Prior to joining the History Department at Northwestern, she taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.  Her first book, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia (Cornell, 2014) traced the emergence of nationhood among Christian Orthodox peasants in Macedonia during the final decades of Ottoman rule in the region.  

Yosmaoğlu has served as the Director of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at the Buffett Institute since Fall 2019, and the President of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association since Fall 2023.  

She is the co-editor (with Kerem Öktem) of Turkish Jews and Their Diasporas: Entanglements and Separations, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), the first comprehensive English-language publication on the Jews of Turkey with a contemporary focus, with contributions from leading scholars in the field.  Yosmaoğlu is currently writing a book on the migration of Russian and Romanian Jews to the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century.

Affiliated Programs

• Middle Eastern and North African Studies
• Crown Center for Jewish and Israeli Studies
• Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program (Director)

Publications

Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Cornell University Press), 2013.

Teaching Interests

At Northwestern Yosmaoğlu has taught graduate seminars on Political Violence and methods in Middle Eastern studies; survey courses on the Ottoman Empire; undergraduate research seminars on early Republican Turkish history; WWI in the Middle East and North Africa; nationalism and war in the Middle East, and a freshman seminar on the Armenian Genocide.

Recent Awards and Honors

• Lise Meitner Fellowship, Austrian Research Foundation, 2017-19.
• Short list, 2015 Runciman Award (Anglo-Hellenic League).