Aimee Genell

Aimee Genell is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Her research focuses on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and its entanglements with Europe in the area of international law and international relations.  

Genell’s book, Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East (under contract, Columbia University Press), traces the Ottoman roots of the post-imperial political order through an analysis of the inter-imperial contest over autonomous Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

With a grant from the American Research Institute in Turkey, she started a new research project on the history of the Allied military occupation of Ottoman lands after the First World War (1918-1923). The project reexamines this critical period of state unmaking by focusing on how Ottoman subjects imagined and fought for different futures alongside the relentless fragmentation of space over the years of occupation. 

Genell has published and co-authored several articles on Ottoman legal history from an international perspective. Her research has been supported by numerous external grants, including the Fulbright for Turkey and the ACLS. Prior to joining Pardee, Genell held a postdoctoral fellowship at International Security Studies at Yale University and taught at the University of Miami, the University of California, Berkeley and at the University of West Georgia. 

Professor Genell’s areas of expertise include the history of international law and international relations, transformative military occupation, weak states in international politics, the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, and legal history.