News & Events

The BILQIS Project and the Irish Centre for Human Rights, in collaboration with the Department of History, invite you to a lecture by Dr Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (Trinity College Dublin) as part of the Ottoman History Seminar Series.

Title: Revolutionaries, Counterinsurgency, and Humanitarianism in Late Ottoman Europe

@ 4 pm, Wednesday, 15 October 2025, MY127 Lecture Theatre 3

Event poster:

Abstract:
Revolution loomed large in the Ottoman Balkans at the turn of the century. This was when armed bands of guerrillas roaming around the highland villages had become a common sight, as had their pursuit by Ottoman flying columns across the Macedonian countryside. These encounters often left behind trails of destruction, with villages sacked and at times entirely burnt to the ground by Ottoman troops. This talk focuses on one such village—Smerdesh (Krystallopigi in modern Greece)—which was subjected to repeated episodes of state violence in the spring of 1903. Interested in unpacking the materiality of modern violence, this talk will explore how the availability of new means of warfare transformed both revolution and state violence, technologically as well as discursively.

Speaker:
Dr. Ramazan Hakkı Öztan
Assistant Professor in Modern History
Trinity College Dublin

Dr Ramazan Hakkı Öztan is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin. Before joining TCD, he served as an assistant professor at the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul (2020 to 2023) and as a postdoctoral research fellow in an ERC project at the University of Neuchâtel (2017 to 2020). His scholarship focuses on the political and economic history of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the twentieth-century Middle East. Thematically, he is interested in the intersection of revolution, empire, globalisation, and capitalism.