Hratch Kestenian

Hratch Kestenian is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. A few years ago, at the American University of Beirut, he defended his master’s thesis entitled “A Portrait of Armenian Student Life at the Syrian Protestant College: 1885-1918.” At present, he is working on a socio-medical history of the late Ottoman Empire. His dissertation explores the story of tuberculosis in the Ottoman Empire during the period between the establishment of the Imperial Medical School in 1827 and the end of World War I. More specifically, he is interested in looking at how, with the centralization of government, medicine and disease acquired a new meaning.