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, with interests in agriculture, disease, and science.

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 is forthcoming from FOL Kitap. The book offers a new account of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the states of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey grounded in the arid ecology of the Jazira region, its mobile people, and distinctive locusts. It unearths what borders meant in the lives of not only locusts but also Arab and Kurdish nomads, Armenian deportees, and Assyrian refugees. 

 

His next project is Ottoman Roots: Agriculture and Displacement 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, Past & Present, and International Journal of Middle East Studies (co-authored with Shay Hazkani), 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 is the editor in chief of Ottoman History Podcast.

Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dolbee was a lecturer on History & Literature at Harvard. He previously 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.