Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an affiliate faculty in History, Religious Studies, and Middle East Studies. Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement, with expertise in the Ottoman and Russian empires and their successor states. His research interrogates the relationship between refugee mobility, political economy, and ethnic cleansing, which were critical to the making of the modern Middle East and Eastern Europe.

In 2023-24, Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is on a sabbatical while in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center (read more here). In the following summers, he will be a Fulbright Global Scholar in Turkey and Pakistan.

Dr. Hamed-Troyansky’s first book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2024), examines the migration of about a million Muslim refugees from Russia to the Ottoman Empire between the 1850s and World War I. This book revisits late Ottoman history through the lens of migration and explores the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. North Caucasian refugees—Circassians, Chechens, Ossetians, Dagestanis, and others—settled throughout the Ottoman Empire, in today's 14 nation-states, including Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Bulgaria, and Greece. Empire of Refugees argues that the Ottoman government constructed a Muslim refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Dr. Hamed-Troyansky is currently working on a new book, which examines hijra, or Muslim refugee migration, in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since the mid-nineteenth century. 

Dr. Hamed-Troyansky conducted archival research in over twenty public and private archives in Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, 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, and the Social Science Research Council. He held residential research fellowships at the American research centers in Amman and Sofia.

Dr. Hamed-Troyansky welcomes graduate projects in global refugee history and the modern history of the Middle East and the Caucasus.

Dr. Hamed-Troyansky received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Dr. Hamed-Troyansky grew up in the Baltics, completed his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Scotland, and briefly studied in Syria and Egypt.