Ümit Kurt

Fellow, SCAS.
Assistant Professor of History and Affiliate, Centre for the Study of Violence, University of Newcastle,
New South Wales

Ümit Kurt is a historian of the modern Middle East with a research focus on intercommunal violence,
forced displacement, and economic dispossession. He received his PhD in History from Clark University,
Worcester, MA, in 2016. He has held postdoctoral positions at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at
Harvard University, and the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and was a Visiting
Assistant Professor in the Armenian Studies Program at California State University, Fresno. A Fellow of
the Royal Historical Society, his first book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an
Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021), won the Dr Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence
in Armenian Studies and the Honorable Mention Book Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association,
and was selected as a finalist for the PROSE Award in the category of World History by the Association of
American Publishers. His articles have appeared in various journals, including Middle Eastern Studies, British
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Nation and Nationalism, History Compass, Patterns of Prejudice, Holo-
caust and Genocide Studies, and Journal of Genocide Research.

He is currently working on two projects, the first exploring biographies of grassroots level perpetrators of
the Armenian Genocide, and the second looking at the history of global patterns of mass violence in the
Ottoman borderlands between the 1860s and 1920s. While at SCAS, Kurt will work on the lives and legacies
of genocide perpetrators who actively participated in the annihilation of Armenians and the plundering of their
wealth and cultural heritage.

Ümit Kurt is in residence in the autumn of 2024.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.