About this lecture

The routes of migration in the “long” twentieth century form passages through which not only people have changed their location, but also the material and immaterial goods which they have taken with them. In policy-making circles today, representations of migration can freeze positive memories of that which needs preservation or melancholic memories of often dramatic, multiple levels of migration experience taking place in a distant world. In an attempt to advocate greater sensitivity to these various experiences in one migratory story, Isa Blumi proposes to bring historic perspective.

This lecture took place on 12 April 2022.  You can watch the recording of the lecture (2022) in the video below. 

About the speaker

Isa Blumi (Stockholm University) researches societies in the throes of social, economic, and political transformation. He compares how Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Italian, British, Dutch, Spanish, and French imperialist projects in the Islamic world intersected with, and were thus informed by, events within the Ottoman Empire. His latest work covers the late Ottoman period and successor regimes, arguing that events in the Balkans and Middle East are the engines of change in the larger world. In this respect, he explores in a comparative, integrated manner how (post-)Ottoman societies found in, for instance, Albania/Yugoslavia, Turkey, the Gulf, and Yemen fit into what is a global story of transition. This in turn informs the story of the Atlantic world, especially the emergence of modern European imperialism and the Americas. His research into migration as a primary lens to understand such processes have resulted in numerous articles and the book: Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).