Zozan Pehlivan completed her Ph.D. in the Department of History in 2016 under the supervision of Ariel Salzmann. The dissertation, which is based on extensive research in the Ottoman and British archives, examines the impact of climatic anomalies over the nineteenth century and the resulting environmental disasters on the lives of peasants and pastoralists living in regions of Asia Minor which today form parts of the states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
After completing her graduate study at Queen’s, she received a research fellowship from Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) at McGill University, where she is working on revising her dissertation into a monograph. Her research interests include histories of climate and environment, the economics of pastoral nomadism, human-animal interaction, and the relationship between environmental change and conflict in the Ottoman Empire and Middle East.
At the completion of her two-year postdoctoral program at the IOWC in August 2018, Dr. Pehlivan will join the Department of History of the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) as a full-time faculty member in the field of Environmental History.
