Chris Gratien

Chris Gratien is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on global environmental history and the modern Middle East. He previously held postdoctoral positions at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies. His first book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford, 2022), was selected as winner of the Nikki Keddie Book Prize by the Middle East Studies Association. His current book project, The Book and the Sword: Civil War and Reconstruction in Late Ottoman Syria, offers a microhistory of empire and the Ottoman reforms known as the Tanzimat, centered on the unsolved murder of an American missionary. 

 

Gratien is the producer and frequent host of the Ottoman History Podcast, a leading public humanities project in the field of Middle East studies, which has featured the voices of over 500 scholars specializing in the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, the Islamic world and beyond since 2011. 

 

As a visiting faculty at Yale, Prof. Gratien will offer courses in the Department of History, as well as the Program in the History of Science and Medicine.