historian · writer · editor

Zavier Wingham (they/he) is a PhD candidate in the joint program for History and Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University. His dissertation research explores how changing Ottoman elite conceptions of race, slavery, and blackness in the Ottoman Empire contributed to new forms of racialization of enslaved and manumitted Africans from the 1840s until the early Turkish republican period, as well as how Africans in the Ottoman empire experienced these processes of racialization and sought to create new kinds of community and ways of living. Trained in both Middle Eastern and African Diaspora studies, their intellectual interests are an ever-growing constellation of Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and literary studies. Moreover, their research is motivated by thinking across the Transatlantic, Indian Ocean, and Ottoman contexts of enslavement and invites others to consider how we might bring assumed disparate geographic, disciplinary, and theoretical questions into conversation.

Their research has been supported by various grants and fellowships such as the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), and Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED). He has previously served as the administrative assistant for Ottoman & Turkish Studies at NYU and formerly an editor and social media manager for Ajam Media Collective. Beyond academia, they are a freelance editor, writer, and enjoys collecting postcards, practicing yoga, and tending to their plants. 

Educational Background

• PhD in History and Middle East & Islamic Studies, New York University, Present

• M Phil in History and Middle East & Islamic Studies, New York University, 2020

• MA in Near Eastern Studies, New York University, 2017

• BA in Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations, The University of Texas at Austin, 2014