Rate My Professor Umit Kurt

Dr. Ümit Kurt serves as Honorary Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences within the College of Human and Social Futures at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in History from Clark University in 2016 and a Master of Arts from Sabancı University in Turkey. Kurt's career includes postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 2016 to 2018 and the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute from 2017 to 2022, visiting assistant professorships and lectureships at Clark University, Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, California State University Fresno, and Sabancı University. He also served as Vice Executive Secretary of the International Network of Genocide Scholars from 2020 to 2023.

As a historian of the late Ottoman Empire, Dr. Kurt examines transformations of imperial structures and their role in constituting the republican regime, drawing on theories of state and class, social identity, ethnicity, race, and social, economic, and environmental histories of violence. His research focuses on mass violence against Ottoman minorities including Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Greeks, and its impacts on the post-Ottoman Middle East, Balkans, and Levant. Key publications include The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021), a PROSE Award Finalist in World History (2022) and Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Award Honourable Mention (2022); Antep 1915: Genocide and Perpetrators (İletişim, 2018); co-authored The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn, 2015); and co-edited Armenians and Kurds in the Late Ottoman Empire (2020) and The Committee of Union and Progress: Founders, Ideology, and Structure (2021). His articles appear in Journal of Genocide Research, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Middle Eastern Studies, and others. Major awards encompass the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2021, $389,020) for “Global Patterns of Mass Violence: Ottoman Borderlands in Context, 1890-1920,” along with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarships and National Association for Armenian Studies and Research recognition. Kurt’s work informs understandings of contemporary conflicts in Syria, the Middle East, Balkans, Cyprus, and Turkey’s policies toward Kurds and Yazidis.