Cevat Dargin

Cevat Dargın is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African history, director of the International Studies Program, and faculty fellow at the Patton Peace and War Center at Norwich University. A historian of the late Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, and the wider world, his research focuses on empire, colonialism, state formation, historical geography, and the politics of race and ethnicity. Drawing on multilingual archival research and global and transnational approaches, his scholarship examines how imperial transformations and modern state-building reshaped territories, populations, and political belonging.

His current book project, "Roads to Dersim: Kurds, Empire, Race, and the State," explores the transformation of an Ottoman frontier into Turkish national territory through infrastructure development, racialized discourses, and state violence. A second project, "Mapping Empire: The United States and the Post-Ottoman Middle East," examines American efforts to shape the international order following the collapse of empires. His scholarly and public-facing writings have appeared in the "Journal of Historical Geography," "Voices on Peace and War," "Jadaliyya," "PolitikART," and edited volumes on Ottoman, Kurdish, and Middle Eastern history.

At Norwich, Dargın teaches courses on Middle Eastern history, international studies, political Islam, Israel and Palestine, and the United States in the world. His teaching emphasizes critical inquiry, historical thinking, and the importance of examining familiar questions from unfamiliar perspectives. Through primary sources, maps, documentary films, and interdisciplinary approaches, he encourages students to challenge inherited narratives, evaluate competing interpretations, and develop independent judgments about the historical processes shaping the contemporary world.

Ph.D. Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
M.A. Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University
M.A. Political Science, City University of New York
B.A. Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University 

HI 214 History of the Middle East
HI 363 Israel and Palestine 
HI 363 U.S. in the Middle East 
HI 404 Political Islam
IN 101 Introduction to International Studies 
IN 410 Seminar in International Studies

“The State of the Kurdish Question since the End of the Ottoman Empire,” in The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy, eds. Hans Lukas Kieser and Khatchig Mouradian(London: I.B. Tauris, 2025).

“Anticipatory Historical Geographies of Violence: Imagining, Mapping and Integrating Dersim into the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish State, 1866–1939,” Journal of Historical Geography 81 (2023): 162–178.

“Hayali İsyancılar: Türk ulus inşasında Alevi Kürtler” [Imagined Rebels: Alevi Kurds in Turkish Nation–Building], in Kürtler ve Cumhuriyet [The Kurds and the Republic], eds. Ayhan Işık, et al., 217–228 (Ankara: Dipnot, 2023).

“Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e bir ‘Eşkıyalık Efsanesi’: Koçan Aşireti (1890–1938)” [“A Legend of
Banditry Across Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey”], in Şekâvet, Hıyânet, İsyan: Geç
Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Eşkıyalık [Brigandage, Treachery, Rebellion: Banditry from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey], eds. Yalçın Çakmak & Ahmet Özcan, 69–89 (İletişim, 2023).