I am a historian, visual artist, chess enthusiast, occasional podcast host, and classical guitar player living between the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. and Istanbul, Turkey. I was born in Istanbul at the end of the last millennium and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island amid the aftershocks of the 2008 global financial crisis. I went to Wesleyan University for undergrad as a QuestBridge Scholar. There, I studied in the interdisciplinary College of Social Studies, where I gained a strong background in modern European history, political and social theory, economics, and political science. My thesis on the Gezi Park Protests won my department’s best thesis award, and, more importantly, imparted on me a lifetime of curiosity about how the past inflects (and inflicts!) the present. In 2016, a few months after graduation, I became a History Teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, NY. Teaching sleepy-eyed eighth graders about the “Gunpowder Empires” at 8:30 in the morning confirmed my desire to pursue graduate studies, and I enrolled at the New School for Social Research for my MA in Historical Studies.
After a few conferences, several jobs, and many applications, I became a PhD Candidate in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University. Ever expansive in my research interests, and easily seduced by a laguna in the literature, my explorations in the Ottoman State Archives led me to a group of mines in Eastern Asia Minor. Over the last couple of years, I have been researching and trying to understand the silver, lead, gold, and copper mines of Keban and Ergani. To do so, I not only became proficient in various paleographic traditions in the Ottoman Empire, but also learned geological jargon, examined mining sites worldwide, and persuaded folks (more times than I care to admit) in Maden and Keban that my questions did not require the gendarmerie's intervention. Already proficient in Turkish, French, and Arabic, I learned German, Kurmancî Kurdish, and Western Armenian and traveled across Europe, Turkey, and Armenia for archival research.
In my research, I’m drawn to the seemingly mundane and unglamorous stories—of workers, animals, landscapes, and materials—that quietly reveal how larger political and economic systems function. I follow my sources until I have a picture of how power functions in a given space and time. I aim to theorize from the ground and, with any luck, generate new historiographical forms based on the structures I am examining. For my current project, I am particularly inspired by new materialism, political ecology, and labor histories of the global south. Titled “The Imperial Mines: The Political Ecology and Economy of Extraction in the Ottoman Empire, 1720-1820,” my dissertation pieces together the stories of ore-bearing rocks, mining shafts, forests, and intrusive groundwater with those of miners, artisans, sarrafs, charcoal makers, militias, rebels, and semi-nomadic mule drivers across Asia Minor.
My research has been generously supported by the American Research Institute in Turkey, Fulbright-Hays, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC).
I am a co-convener of the interdisciplinary Minescapes Working Group, organized by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. We meet monthly to workshop papers and presentations on extraction across different times and places. I am also a member of the Ottoman Political Economy Network.
If you have any questions, would like to learn more about my research, or have an idea for a collaboration, please email me at derenertas@fas.harvard.edu.
