Professor Abdulhamit Kırmızı is a historian specialising in the late Ottoman Empire, based at Marmara University, but he is currently a research scientist at the ERC-funded CAPITALEAST project at UCD. His particular focus is on bureaucracy, governance, and intercommunal relations under imperial rule.
While his primary work concentrates on officials and statecraft, his many publications intersect with war and conflict: through soldier diaries, memory, and political transitions, he explores how war, bureaucracy, individual experiences, and collective memory intersect, and how wartime trauma impacts personal and institutional life. One example is his Turkish article “Günlükten Sonra Hayat: Bir Asker Günlüğünün Biyografiyle İlişkisi” (Toplumsal Tarih Akademi, 2022), which examines a soldier’s diary from 1916–1922, tracing how wartime experiences, illness, and identity re-emerge in postwar civilian life. Another relevant study is “The Untimely Sources of World War I: Taking Advantage of the Obsession with Commemorations,” published in Archiv Orientální (2020). In that piece, he critiques how centennial commemorations influence which voices and narratives from the First World War are heard or silenced.
Beyond these, his work on empire-to-nation transitions also links to war studies. For instance, “After Empire, Before Nation: Competing Ideologies and the Bolshevik Moment of the Anatolian Revolution” (in Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions, 2017) explores how upheavals during and after wartime shaped political ideologies and diplomatic alignments in Anatolia. His “Süreyya Bey Vlora: An Ottoman Albanian Between Empire and Nation” (Archiv Orientální, 2023) investigates how an Ottoman bureaucrat and memoirist navigated loyalty, identity, and legitimacy amid the violent ruptures of the empire’s collapse and the emergence of Albanian statehood. Süreyya Vlora’s memoirs, also published by Kırmızı in 2009, reveal how wartime pressures, institutional breakdowns, and contested sovereignties influenced both personal conscience and administrative practice.