Samuel Dolbee

Assistant Professor of History
D Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Studies of the Middle East

Samuel Dolbee is an environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East.

His book Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press, and was the co-winner of the 2024 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Book Award. Its Turkish translation by Can Gümüş-İspir was released in 2025 with FOL Kitap. His next project is Ottoman Roots: Trees and Time at the End of Empire, which is an environmental history of fruit, trees, and refugees in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from the Eastern Mediterranean to California. 

Dolbee’s articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Environmental History, International Journal of Middle East Studies (co-authored with Shay Hazkani), Journal of Global History, and Past & Present, and have received honors such as the 2020 Alixa Naff Article Prize and the 2023 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Article Prize. Dolbee has also contributed chapters to edited volumes on the history of food (co-authored with Chris Gratien) and disease, respectively. He was previously editor-in-chief of the Ottoman History Podcast.

Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dolbee was a lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard. He also held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale’s Program in Agrarian Studies, Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center, and Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Dolbee completed his PhD at New York University in the joint program in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies. He has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in History and International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.