Der Matossian’s “Shattered Dreams of Revolution” Chosen as SAS Outstanding Book Award
The Society for Armenian Studies announced that Bedross Der Matossian’s Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014) has been chosen as the recipient of the SAS Outstanding Book Award.
Established in 2015, the SAS Outstanding Award accepted nominations for works that advanced knowledge and scholarship on Armenian society, culture, and history from ancient times to the present. According to the selection committee, Shattered Dreams demonstrated substantive knowledge and overall high level of scholarship. This is the first time that the Book Award was made and covered works published in the period of April 1, 2013 to April 30, 2015.
Dr. Der Matossian will receive a $1,000 monetary award from SAS and a certificate of recognition.
Shattered Dreams of Revolution focuses on the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and examines the stories of three important groups: Arabs, Armenians, and Jews. The Revolution raised these groups’ expectations for new opportunities of inclusion and citizenship. But as post-revolutionary festivities ended, these euphoric feelings soon turned to pessimism and a dramatic rise in ethnic tensions. Today as the Middle East experiences another set of revolutions, these early lessons of the Ottoman Empire, of unfulfilled expectations and ensuing discontent, still provide important insights into the contradictions of hope and disillusion seemingly inherent in revolution.
Şükrü Hanioğlu (Princeton University) said in Perspectives of Politics “In this well-researched, tightly argued, and sophisticated book, Bedross Der Matossian maintains that the enormous chasm between the Weltanschauungen of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress and of the major Armenian, Jewish, and Arab political organizations and intellectuals made any agreement on the basic tenets of the new constitutional regime impossible . . . [S]tudents of Ottoman, Armenian, Arab, and modern Jewish history will be indebted to Der Matosian for his extremely valuable contribution to the field.”
Benjamin C. Fortna (The University of Arizona) said in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies “… Perhaps the greatest achievement of Der Matossian’s fine study is that it brings to life the multiple voices of some of the most important of these ethnic groups where others have tended to lump them together en bloc.”
Shattered Dreams has been translated into Turkish in 2016 as Hüsrana Uğrayan Devrim: Geç Dönem Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Hürriyet ve Şiddet (Istanbul: İletişim Publications, 2016).
Dr. Der Matossian is an Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska. Born and raised in Jerusalem, he is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he began his graduate studies in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in Middle East History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, he was a Lecturer of Middle East History in the Faculty of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In Spring 2014 he was the Dumanian Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. His areas of interest include ethnic politics in the Middle East, inter-ethnic violence in the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian Genocide and modern Armenian history. He is also the co-editor with Suleiman A. Mourad and Naomi Koltun-Fromm of the forthcoming book Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem (2017).
