Christine Philliou is currently the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and is a Professor in the Department of History. Professor Philliou specializes in the region of the Balkans and the Middle East, specifically focused on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states. She has published Biography of Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), as well as Turkey: A Past Against History (2021). Dr. Philliou received her M.A. and PhD in History from Princeton University, and previously taught the history of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey at Columbia University.
To start, I would love to hear an introduction! What is your field of specialization, and how did you originally come to academia?
I am a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and specifically of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire into the nation-states of the Balkans and the Middle East. I particularly focus on the role and experience of Greek and Turkish people in that process. My first book (Biography of an Empire) was about the role of Christians in Ottoman governance just as national movements dawned in the early nineteenth century. My second book (Turkey: A Past Against History) was about the history of opposition and dissent in the late Ottoman Empire and the transition into Modern Turkey in the early-mid twentieth century.
How did I become interested? I was living in Greece after college and I traveled to Turkey. This was at a time when Greece and Turkey were not friendly, and nobody was admitting that there was anything in common between these two countries. Traveling from Greece to Istanbul (Turkey), and noticing how very similar and how connected they were was a big revelation to me. I wanted to go and learn everything I could about this empire that really fell apart very recently. It was 1922, and this was in the ‘90s, so there were still people alive who had been born in the Ottoman Empire, and yet the memory of it had really been erased. That’s an interesting paradox that I’ve been thinking about throughout my career.