Bolel, Canan 

University of Washington

Research Topic: On the Margins of an Ottoman City: Politics of Exclusion in the Jewish Community of Izmir, 1847–1923

Ms. Bolel is a PhD candidate in the Near and Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Washington. In 2014 she received her MSc in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science. She is interested in experiences of poverty and marginalization in nineteenth-century Ottoman port cities, and her current research focuses on the historical conditions which drove and sustained intracommunal exclusion in Ottoman urban settings. Her ANAMED project concentrates on the period of 1847–1923 in the Jewish community of Izmir and how changing definitions of marginality determined the practice of coercive ordering of the poor in this rapidly changing port city. To understand this microcosm in which social exclusion of the poor was the element for maintaining the cosmic order, she employs sociological and historico-spatial methods. Her study aims to contribute to a presentation of the Ottoman past while giving voice to excluded members of the community who have long remained on the margins of a minority, as well as the margins of Ottoman and Jewish historiography.