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İlkay Yılmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908 in her book Ottoman Passports. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Ottoman government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions, and the use of passports became critical to criminalizing groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries.

İlkay Yılmaz is currently a DFG (German Research Foundation) funded research associate at The department of Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin. She was an Einstein Senior Researcher at the same department. She was a research associate at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient between 2017-19 and between 2014-15. She was working as an assistant professor at Istanbul University from 2014 until 2017. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Historical Sociology, Middle Eastern Studies, Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies, Photoresearcher-Journal of European Society for History of Photography. Her research interests focus on the history of security, passport history, transimperial collaboration on policing, state formation and history of violence in the late Ottoman Empire.

Sponsor(s): Armenian Genocide Research Program, Armenian Studies Program at UC Berkeley, Armenian Studies Program at Fresno State University, University of Michigan's Center for Armenian Studies, and Stanford University's Middle East Studies Department.