Desi

gned

and

pro

duce

d by

the

Off

ice

of C

omm

unic

atio

ns |

201

9

The Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies

invites you to a talk

Portraits of Unbelonging: Photography, the Ottoman State, and the making of Armenian Emigrants

Dr. Zeynep GürselWednesday, April 10, 2019 | 6:00 pm | Charles Hostler Student Center Auditorium

Photograph of Simonian family from Bitlis, bound for America. 1907 Courtesy of Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (Prime Ministry Archives, Istanbul)

Portraits of Unbelonging investigates Armenian families who emigrated from the Ottoman empire through a collection of photographs taken between 1905 and 1908. Armenian Ottoman subjects received their passports on the condition that

they renounce their nationality. The photographs of emigrant families were thus anticipatory arrest warrants designed to prevent the return of subjects who were assumed to pose a threat to the empire. As each photograph faces the Ottoman

past and the American future, Portraits of Unbelonging is a double-sided a history of mass migration on an intimate scale.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is currently NOMIS Fellow at eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel, Switzerland. Gürsel is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (2016), an ethnography of

the international photojournalism industry. She is also the director of Coffee Futures, an award-winning ethnographic film that will be screened in the Issam Fares Institute Auditorium on April 9th at 6:00pm.

Sponsored by: University Research Board; Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies; Center of Arab and Middle Eastern Studies