Isa Blumi

Isa Blumi, Associate Professor at Georgia State University, received his Ph.D. from NYU in 2005, working under the joint program in the History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies departments created in 1996. Writing a comparative history of the complex interactions between imperial authorities and the inhabitants of Ottoman Albania and Yemen, his dissertation, supervised primarily by Zachary Lockman, Fred Cooper, Khaled Fahmy, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, evolved into a project that took Isa nine years to complete. His research took him to national and regional archives in Britain, the US, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Greece, Albania, Kosova, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen. Such obsessive behavior can be partially attributed to the fact that Isa was initially trained in comparative history and political theory at the New School for Social Research, by among others, Talal Asad, Ferenc Feher, Eric Hobsbawm, Charles Tilly and Aristide Zolberg. Under their tutelage, Isa has consistently sought to explain transformations in world history through observations of trans-regional exchanges. Identifying an important function in combining social history, post-colonial theory, with an analysis of state institutions as they evolved over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Isa argues for a more integrated and inter-disciplinary approach to studying such (ex)changes. His first attempt to lay out some of these methodological issues was in his 2003 book entitled: Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878-1918 (Republished with Gorgias Press, 2010)and in numerous articles on Ottoman Balkan and Yemeni history as well as contemporary Balkan issues.

Isa has continued to explore these issues in three recently completed books, all of which initiate a more critical discussion about whether or not historians should study the modern Balkans and the Middle East through the prism of ethno-national and sectarian categories. Arguing that the misuse of analytical categories has long-term consequences to how current events are understood in the media and by policy makers, Isa remains active in the analysis of the modern Balkans, in particular Kosova and Albania, and has written on contemporary Yemen and Persian/Arab Gulf politics as well. These efforts are most evident in his recent book, Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies series, 2010) where by he highlights the underlying factors that are contributing to the current events in Yemen. By using cases drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries--periods neglected in the scholarship on Yemen--Dr. Blumi has been able to demonstrate how misuse of crude categories of analysis--tribes, sectarian groups--has misplaced the source of conflict in present-day Yemen. His book, slowly drawing the attention of journalists and scholars uncomfortable with the generic explanations offered in the mainstream media and think-tanks, offers the most up-to-date explanation for the current violence in Southern Arabia.

Beyond commenting on, and thus offering a new perspective on contemporary Yemen and the larger Arabian peninsula, Dr. Blumi's new books--Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912 (Palgrave, May 2011), Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State (Routledge, May 2011)and Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939 (Bloomsbury, 2013)--reflect his attempts to fuse critical readings of Eurocentric claims to global history with cases drawn from the Ottoman Empire's "peripherial" terroritories in the western Balkans and Arabia. Mobilizing the work of Talal Asad, Frederick Cooper, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and others, these two new books aim to undermine the foundational claims informing how even critical theory loyalists misuse the counter-narrative tools long adopted by post-colonial theorists to challenge western epistomologies. In many ways, these books continue, with actual "case studies" drawn from the late Ottoman Empire, what was started by Spivak, Althusser, Derrida and ultimately Robert Young to undermine the "White Mythologies" that dominate the study of the modern world.

Isa is now embarking on two new projects that explore the interactive dynamics in the nineteenth century South China Sea and Arabia.