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Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Slavic Review. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.
In 2024-25, Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is Associate Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and leads the campus-wide Initiative on Global Migration and Inequality.
Dr. Hamed-Troyansky’s first book, Empire of Refugees, explores the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. It focuses on the migration of about a million Muslim refugees from Russia to the Ottoman Empire between the 1850s and World War I. North Caucasian refugees settled throughout the Ottoman Empire, in today's 14 nation-states, including Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Bulgaria, and Greece. The book shows that the Ottoman government constructed a refugee regime for Muslims, which functioned parallel to the immigration system.
Dr. Hamed-Troyansky conducted archival research in public and private archives in Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia, including the autonomous republics of Dagestan, North Ossetia-Alania, and Kabardino-Balkaria. He works with sources in Arabic, Ottoman and modern Turkish, Russian, and Bulgarian. His research has been supported by, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Program. He held residential research fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center and the American research centers in Jordan, Turkey, and Bulgaria.
Dr. Hamed-Troyansky welcomes graduate projects in global refugee history and the modern history of the Middle East and the Caucasus.
Publications:
Book
Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Stanford University Press, 2024.
Winner | 2025 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Association for the Study of Nationalities
Winner | 2024 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies, Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies
Winner | 2024 Gold Medal in the History (World) category, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires.
Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
See the digital map of over 1,100 North Caucasian refugee villages in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.
Listen to podcast episodes about the book: Ottoman History Podcast, New Books Network (Middle East studies and Russian and Eurasian studies channels), Turkey Book Talk, The Eurasian Knot, The Lausanne Project, and Converging Dialogues.
Read features of the book in Jadaliyya, 7iber (in Arabic), Oriente Medio (in Spanish), and East Journal (in Italian).
The book's translations into Turkish and Russian are forthcoming in 2026.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
"Letters from the Ottoman Empire: Migration from the Caucasus and Russia's Pan-Islamic Panic," Slavic Review 82, no. 2 (2023): 311–33. [PDF]
Honorable Mention | 2023 Ab Imperio Award for the best study in new imperial history and history of diversity in Northern Eurasia.
“Welcome, Not Welcome: The North Caucasian Diaspora's Attempted Return to Russia since the 1960s,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 24, no. 3 (2023): 585–610. [PDF]
“Ottoman and Egyptian Quarantines and European Debates on Plague in the 1830s–1840s,” Past & Present 253 (2021): 235–70 [PDF]
“Becoming Armenian: Religious Conversions in the Late Imperial South Caucasus,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 1 (2021): 242–72. [PDF]
Honorable Mention | 2022 Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies, UCF Kurdish Political Studies Program.
“Circassian Refugees and the Making of Amman, 1878–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 4 (2017): 605–23. [PDF]
Winner | 2018 Best Article Prize, Syrian Studies Association.
Winner | 2018 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies, Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.
Roundtable Articles
“Hijra from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: Middle East Routes of Muslim Displacement,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 56, no. 3 (2024): 490–94. [PDF]
Peer-Reviewed Chapters
Courses:
GLOBL 1 Global History, Culture, and Ideology
GLOBL 112 Global Refugee Migration
GLOBL 183 Global Middle East
GLOBL 292A Global Migration
GLOBL 292IB Displacement in the Middle East and Russia/Soviet Union