Tsolin Nalbantian is an Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History (with ius promovendi) at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

More information about Tsolin Nalbantian

Profile

I am a historian of the Modern Middle East. My research and teaching interests include Middle East diasporas, minorities in the Middle East, the modern political and social histories of Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, the Caucasus, Armenian communities of the Middle East, and more broadly ethnographic and migration studies. I am particularly interested in engaging with, and bringing together, Turkish and Lebanese History and Armenian Studies, fields of research that have not examined their transnational connections and/or have ignored them in favor of national historiographies and periodizations.

My monograph, Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), is a post-Genocide Armenian history of – principally – power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence. Practicing Sectarianism Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022), a volume I co-edited with Lara Deeb and Nadya Sbaiti, brings together historians and anthropologists who see sectarianism as contingent and constructed, and argues that sectarianism can only be understood if we take it seriously as an imaginative and contradictory practice. The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2023), a volume I co-edited with Talar Chahinian and Sossie Kasbarian, is an exciting contribution to the study of not only the modern Armenian diaspora, but also to the field of Diaspora Studies.

In 2021 I was awarded a Comenius Grant and a Leiden Teaching Academy fellowship. They have helped me dedicate myself to teaching and to engaging with the public and non-academics. Both projects integrate Wikipedia, the world’s premier open-access encyclopedia, into the training of Leiden University BA and (Res)MA students interested in the Middle East, and link university education with society.

Supervision

My PhD promotion and supervision focuses primarily on topics relating to the political, social, and cultural histories of communities in the Middle East and the Caucasus in the 19th-20th centuries. I also welcome projects that deal with identity, national politics, diaspora, and minorities, and migration and displacement in the region more generally.

Key Publications

Monographs and edited volumes

• Volume co-editor, Diaspora and ‘Stateless Power’: The Armenian Experience through the Transnational 20^th Century, together with Talar Chahinian and Sossie Kasbarian (New York: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2023).
• Volume co-editor, Practicing Sectarianism: Ethnographic and Archival Interventions on Lebanon, together Lara Deeb and Nadya Sbaiti (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022).
• Armenians Beyond Diaspora: How They Made Lebanon Their Own (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles and Chapters

• “Circulation, Correspondences, Capital, and Campaigning: The Fallout from the 1956 Armenian Church Election,” in More than Homesickness. Expatriated Minorities: Repatriating Money, Commodities and People in the Mediterranean (1492-1956), edited by José Alberto Tavim and Hugo Martins (Évora, Portugal: University of Évora- CIDHEUS, 2024).
• “In Lieu of an Introduction,” Co-written with Talar Chahinian and Sossie Kasbarian. In The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century, edited by Talar Chahinian, Sossie Kasbarian, and Tsolin Nalbantian, 1-23. New York: IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2023.
• “A ‘Little Armenia’ in the Caribbean”: The Armenian Heritage Cruise as a Simulacrum,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 22, no.2 (2022): 198-218.
• “Practicing Sectarianism in Lebanon and Beyond,” Introduction co-written with Lara Deeb and Nadya Sbaiti. In Practicing Sectarianism: Ethnographic and Archival Interventions on Lebanon, edited by Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti, 1-13. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
• “From Murder in New York to Salvation from Beirut: Armenian Intra-Sectarianism.” In Practicing Sectarianism: Ethnographic and Archival Interventions on Lebanon, edited by Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti, 116-137. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.
• “Armenians in Lebanon: Becoming Local in the Levant,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 50, no.4 (2018): 773–77.
• “Armenians in the Middle East,” in Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East, Routledge, London (2018), pp. 272-286.
• “Articulating Power through the Parochial” Mashriq & Mahjar 1, no.2 (2013): 41-72.
• “Going Beyond Overlooked Populations in Lebanese Historiography: The Armenian Case,” History Compass 11, 10 (2013): 821-832.

Other articles and commentaries

• “On Recognition,” accepted in International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no.3 (2022): 66-570.
• “Telegrams,” accepted in Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1(2022): 131-132.
• “Entertainment and Consumption: The Impending Destruction of the Armenian Memorial Trchnotz Puyn,” Jadaliyya e-zine (21 June 2016)
• https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/33106/Entertainment-and-Consumption-The-Impending-Destruction-of-the-Armenian-Memorial-Trchnotz-Puyn
• “Breaking House Rules: Hoodies, Hijabs, and Belonging in the Netherlands,” Jadaliyya e-zine (17 May 2015)
• https://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21647/breaking-house-rules_hoodies-hijabs-and-belonging-
• “Housing Archives: When Buildings Become Part of the Record” Ibraaz, Critical Forum on Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (November 2013).
• https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/82

Translations

• Dove in Free Flight a collection of poetry by Faraj Bayraqdar, translator from Arabic to English as part of the New York Translation Collective (Brooklyn: UpSet Press, 2021 and University of Arkansas Press, 2021).

Courses taught:

• Theories and Methods of Middle East and Islamic Studies (MA Seminar)·  
• Power and Resistance in the Modern Middle East (MA Seminar)
• History of the Modern Middle East: Transformations and Challenges (BA 1 Lecture)
• Diasporas and Minorities in the Middle East (BA 3 Seminar)
• History: Middle East (BAIS 1 Lecture)

CV
Education

• PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University (2011)
• MA in Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2003)

Employment

• Lecturer in Middle East History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010-2011)
• Arabic Instructor, Columbia University (2004-2006)

Grants and awards

• Aspasia Grant, NWO
• Leiden Teachers’ Academy Fellow: “Making Education ‘Public’: How to Transfer Research and Academic Skills to the Digital Domain”
• Comenius Teaching Fellow NRO Grant: “Bridging the Gap Between Classroom and Society: Using Wikipedia to Make Students Public Actors”
• Leiden University Global Interactions Seed Grant, together with Irial Glynn (Leiden University)
• NWO VENI Grant: “Connecting Citizens: The Fused Identities of Nusaybin, Turkey and Qamishle, Syria”
• Marie Curie (CIG) Grant, European Commission: “Centering the Margins”
• Zohrab Faculty Fellowship, Columbia University
• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Fellowship, Columbia University
• Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Wenner-Gren Foundation
• FLAS Dissertation Fellowship in Arabic, Columbia University
• Fulbright-Hays Fellowship (Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad), US Department of Education
• FLAS Fellowship in Arabic, New York University
• Graduate Student Fellowship, New York University
• Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), Cairo, Egypt

Publications