My name is Toygun Altıntaş. I received my PhD in Middle Eastern history from the University of Chicago in 2018. Since then I have held postdoctoral (with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation) and research fellowships at FU Berlin and the EUME program in Forum Transregionale Studien. I have also taught classes at Bilgi and Boğaziçi Universities as well as FU Berlin.

My research interests include the mechanisms of imperial governance, politics of minoritization, and the political economy of black markets in the late Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. I have published journal articles and book chapters on the Armenian revolutionary parties, gendered violence, and state-sanctioned discrimination and repression in the late Ottoman Empire. I am in the final stages of completing my first book manuscript The Governance of Inequality: The ‘Armenian Question’ and the Late Ottoman Frontier, which examines the evolution of the Ottoman regime of ethnicity in the empire’s eastern provinces during the nineteenth century.

My new DFG project investigates the relationship between smuggling and monopoly capitalism, and focuses on the operation of the black market for contraband tobacco in the late Ottoman Empire. It investigates the structural imperatives that gave rise to the expansion of the black market as well as the relationship between organized crime and the modern state. Finally, the project explores how selective impunity operated as a governance strategy.

2017 “The Ottoman War on ‘Anarchism’ and Revolutionary Violence.” in To Kill A Sultan: A Transnational History of the Attempt on Abdülhamid II (1905), Edhem Eldem, Houssine Alloul, Henk de Smaele (eds.). (Palgrave: London, 2017)

2017 “The Placard Affair and the Ankara Trial: The Hnchak Party and the Hamidian Regime in Central Anatolia, 1892-1893,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. 4.2 (November 2017): 309-337

2021 “The Abode of Sedition: Resistance, Repression, and Revolution in Sasun (1891-1904)” in Age of Rogues: Revolutionaries and Racketeers in Turn-of-the-Century Eurasia Minor, Alp Yenen and Ramazan Öztan (eds.), (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

2022 “Violence, Armenian Women and the Making of the ‘Armenian Question’ in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Women’s History. 34.3 (2022): 12-33

2023 “Soygundan Pogroma: Tokat’ta Eşkıyalık ve “Ermeni Meselesi,” in Şekâvet, Hıyânet, İsyan: Geç Osmanlı'dan Cumhuriyet'e Eşkıyalık, Ahmet Özcan and Yalçın Çakmak (eds.), (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2023)

2023 “Armenians, Muslims, Citizens: Hnchak Pamphleteering in Central Anatolia,” in The History of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, Bedross Der Matossian (ed.), (I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury, 2023)