Deren Ertas
Biography
Deren Ertas is a Turkish-American researcher and historian splitting time between Istanbul and the Northeast Corridor. At present, she is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs and in the Department of History at Brown University.
Ertas is one of the co-conveners of the Minescapes Working Group (hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine), an occasional podcast host for the Ottoman History Podcast and the New Books Network, and a member of the Ottoman Political Economy Network.
She is completing her PhD in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University, prior to which she received her MA from the New School for Social Research and her BA from Wesleyan University.
Research
Ertas is a social, economic, and environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East, focused on how the economic organization of production shapes social relations, the material world, and political expression.
Her first book project, The Imperial Minescape, examines how the Ottoman Empire built and sustained state power through the silver, gold, lead, and copper mines of the Upper Euphrates Valley (present-day Elazığ, Turkey). Drawing on archival research in Turkey, Armenia, and Europe, it argues that the region was reorganized around subterranean extraction, revealing material foundations of Ottoman power that agrarian-focused histories have missed.
At Brown, she is developing articles and a book proposal from this research and beginning a second project, Indebted Subjects, Laboring Masses, which asks how credit operated as a mechanism of labor discipline and capital accumulation at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Those working in adjacent fields are warmly invited to reach out.