You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as “Missionary history in the late Ottoman Empire and the Mandates” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 16 October 2025, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Venue: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room
Title: Missionary history in the late Ottoman Empire and the Mandates
Speaker: Philippe Bourmaud, Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes / Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3
Abstract:
Studies of communal trajectories from the late Ottoman Empire into the post-Ottoman world have underlined the rupture of the First World War and 1915, in demographic, economic, social, and geographical terms. These studies have stressed the new territorial order which Anatolian Christian diasporas found themselves forced into, focusing on the nostalgia and coping mechanisms through mass violence and forced migrations.
Missionary organizations were part of the social environment of Christian Anatolian communities, despite meeting at times with defiance and hostility from the latter. What can their trajectory tell us about the Christian communities they worked with and within? Through the case of the Jesuits and of a German, then Alsatian protestant missionary organization, I will attempt to trace continuities, discontinuities and redefined relations between missionaries and displaced Anatolian Christians.
Bio:
Dr. Philippe Bourmaud is an assistant professor at the University Jean Moulin – Lyon 3, currently on a leave to work as the director of the Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes (Istanbul). His work deals with health history, missionary history, the social and cultural history of inter-communal relations in the Middle East.