Elyse Semerdjian

Elyse Semerdjian is Associate Professor of Islamic World/Middle Eastern History at Whitman College. A specialist in the history of the Ottoman Empire and Syria, she authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) as well as several articles on gender, non-Muslims, and law in the Ottoman Empire. She received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. Semerdjian is a two-time Fulbright awardee to Syria. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and as a book review editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies. In the Spring of 2013, she was the Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago. She was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year to support her new book project, Remnants: Gender, Islamized Armenians, and Collective Memory of the Armenian Genocide. Semerdjian is also an occasional contributor to the Armenian Weekly.