Catalina Hunt | The Ohio State University (original) (raw)

Dr. Catalina Hunt is a Lecturer in the Department of History at The Ohio State University and a Faculty Member in the First Year Experience Program at Trinity University. She is also a reviewer for the Fulbright Program for grant applications focusing on Middle Eastern history and a former visiting researcher at The University of Texas at Austin. She has a Ph.D. in Ottoman/Middle Eastern/Islamic World History from The Ohio State University, with research and teaching fields in World and European History. She also holds a Ph.D. in Early Modern Ottoman History from Ovidius University in her native Romania. Primarily a social historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, Dr. Hunt researches borderland identities, migration, gender, and transregional and transnational communities in Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies in the Middle East and Europe. Her areas of interest and expertise are in the Middle East and the Balkans, specifically modern Turkey and Romania.

Her current book project, "From Subject to Citizen in Ottoman Borderlands: The Muslims of Dobruca, 1839-1914," argues that a combination of global and regional challenges, including modernity, migration, war, and border change, shaped the historical experience of Dobruja’s Muslim women and men during their transition from empire to nation in previously unappreciated ways. Based on sources in Ottoman Turkish, Modern Turkish, Romanian, French, and English, she argues that this historical moment exposed this community to ideas of modernity that shaped their understanding of the world and their place within it, prompting their cultural and political transformation. As their identities were reshaped through modern states, local Muslims engaged with transnational networks from the broader Islamic world that set off the movement for cultural reform and political mobilization within their community. Her project bridges different fields and disciplines, including history, sociology, and anthropology, underscoring the strength of Ottoman legacy in post-Ottoman states and the delicate work that ethno-confessional groups did in negotiating their identities under the pressure of empires and states during the modern period. This research was supported by various grants, including Fulbright-Hays and American Research in Istanbul Fellowships, generating articles published in English and Romanian in the United States and Europe, specifically in Studia et Documenta Turcologica, Revue des Études Sud-Est Européennes, and Irish Slavonic Studies, along with the chapter in The Routledge Handbook of the Crimean War.

Dr. Hunt has presented her research in seminars, conferences, or as a guest speaker at the University of Iceland (Iceland), The University of Texas at Austin, The Ohio State University, The Southeast Europe Association (Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft) in Tutzing (Germany), Columbia University, University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne, University of Sofia (Bulgaria), University of Maynooth (Ireland), Denison University, George Washington University, University of Oxford (The UK), Koç University (Turkey), The American Research Institute in Istanbul (Turkey), and the University of Bucharest (Romania).

Dr. Hunt has published a book in Romanian on the status of non-Muslims living in Islamic territories during the classical age of Islam, and several articles, book chapters, and reviews in American and European peer-reviewed publications. Her most recent study regards the impact of the Crimean War on the Crimean Tatars of the Nineteenth Century, which was published in "The Routledge Handbook of the Crimean War." She is currently working on an article exploring whether the significant Muslim population shift in the Dobruja region during the early modern and modern periods supports or contradicts the settler colonial paradigm as applied to the Ottoman context.

Dr. Hunt's teaching portfolio includes survey courses in Islamic World History, Modern Middle East, Modern Europe, World History, and transnational history at Kenyon College (2019-22), Franklin & Marshall College (2017-18), Denison University (2015-17), and The Ohio State University (2012-25). Her upper-level seminars often have a comparative angle, as they focus on modern borders and identities in Europe and the Middle East, the Muslim experience in Europe, empires and nations in Eastern Europe, migrant histories in Ottoman and Mexican contexts, secularism and Islamic "fundamentalism" in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, etc. She also teaches writing in the First Year Experience Program at Trinity University.
Address: 22918 Evangeline

less