Department of History

Deren Ertas is a Research Associate in International and Public Affairs at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs and in the Department of History. She is a social, economic, and environmental historian of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East. Her research, broadly conceived, addresses how the economic organization of the forces of production shapes social relations, the material world, and political expression. 

Ertas’s current book project, The Imperial Minescape, is based on her dissertation entitled “Geos and Empire: Miners, Environments, and State in the Ottoman East, 1720s-1820s.” Building on years of archival research in Turkey, Armenia, and Europe, the project examines how the Ottoman Empire built and sustained state power through the silver, gold, lead, and copper mines of Keban and Ergani in the Upper Euphrates Valley (present-day Elazığ, Turkey). Ertas argues that this region became an “imperial minescape” over the course of the eighteenth century, reorganized around subterranean extraction via the appropriation of labor, capital, and nature. Her research shows how this understudied sector reveals the material foundations of Ottoman state power and political economy in ways that agrarian-focused histories of the period have missed. 

At Brown, she will develop articles and a book proposal based on her dissertation research and teach a course on global mining history. Time permitting, she also wants to begin archival research for her next book-length project, tentatively titled Indebted Subjects, Laboring Masses. Examining court records from major port cities in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, she hopes to better understand how credit operated as a mechanism of labor discipline and capital accumulation in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. 

Ertas will receive her PhD from the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University in February 2026. Her research has been generously supported by the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Fulbright-Hays, Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), and the Council of Overseas Research Centers. Along with Pamela H. Smith, Jordan Howell, and Tina Asmussen, she is a co-convener of the Minescapes Working Group hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.