Rate My Professor Melis Hafez

Melis Hafez is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she has served on the faculty for twelve years. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a B.A. in Psychology (Summa Cum Laude) with a minor in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA. As a historian of the long nineteenth century focused on the Ottoman Empire—a multiethnic, polyglot, and multiconfessional polity spanning the Middle East and Balkans—her scholarship examines the cultural history of this era amid land losses, social and economic upheavals, wars, violence, and transformative reforms. Hafez's work addresses the culture of productivity, nationhood, citizenship, and morality, positioning Ottoman developments within global contexts of capitalism, state practices, and cultural transformations.

Her first monograph, Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society (Cambridge University Press, 2021), analyzes how Ottoman moralists moralized industriousness and framed laziness as a social disease linked to new civic culture and exclusionary practices. Key publications also include the chapter “And the Awakening Came as a Result of the Balkan War: The Changing Conceptualization of the Body in Late Ottoman Society” in War and Nationalism: The Lasting Socio-Political Impacts of the Balkan Wars, edited by Isa Blumi and Hakan Yavuz (University of Utah Press, 2013); “Reflections on the NEH Seminar on Russian and Ottoman Empires” in Ab Imperio (2015); and her translation and introduction of Mourid Barghouti's Sairin Filistini (“On Soz,” Kure Yayınları, 2023). Her current project, Moral Entrepreneurs: Cultural Politics and Moral Citizenship in Late Ottoman Society, investigates deontological morality as social intervention by Ottoman moralists from the 1870s to 1920s. Hafez has earned the Humanities Research Center Residential Fellowship (2020), VCU Catalyst Award for Research (2019), and ARIT-NEH Advanced Fellowships (2015-16 and 2019). She teaches courses such as Modern Middle East from the 1600s to present, Early Modern and Modern Ottoman Empire, and World War One in the Middle East, and serves on the department’s Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee. Her research presentations span institutions worldwide.