Sabri Ates

Associate Professor Chair

History

Email

sates@smu.edu
Office Location

Dallas Hall Room 65
Phone

214-768-2968

Education

Ph.D. New York University
M.A. University of Ankara
B.A. Middle East Technical University, Ankara

 

http://faculty.smu.edu/sates/Sabri_Ates/About_Me.html

Biography

Sabri Ateş is a historian of the modern Middle East whose work focuses on the late Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, with particular attention to the Kurds and Kurdistan. His research explores questions of nationalism, empire, border-making, and political agency across these interconnected regions.

His academic journey began with an examination of the Ottoman intellectual Tunalı Hilmi Bey, whose transformation from a pluralist reformer to a fervent nationalist offered a compelling lens through which to view the shifting political and intellectual landscape of a declining empire. This research, completed with contributions from Dr. Ahmet Demirel, culminated in Ates’s first book, Tunalı Hilmi Bey: Osmanlıdan Cumhuriyete Bir Aydın (İletişim Yayınları, 2009).

His second monograph, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), investigates the creation and enforcement of borders—specifically the long and contested process of establishing the Ottoman-Iranian (and present-day Iraqi) boundary. Drawing from Ottoman, Iranian, British, and Russian sources, the book reveals how this seventy-year project reshaped both state sovereignty and the daily lives of communities divided by the new boundary.

Ateş's current book project examines the 1880 Shaykh Ubeydullah uprising, the first Kurdish movement to seek a unified Kurdish state spanning Ottoman and Iranian territory. Drawing on Ottoman, Iranian, British, and American missionary archives, the project reconstructs why ordinary Kurds took up arms against imperial rule in pursuit of justice and self-determination. In doing so, it recovers Kurdish political agency from historiographical accounts that have long dismissed such resistance as foreign-instigated unrest.
 

In addition to this work, Ates is engaged in several collaborative research initiatives. One is a longue durée history of Ottoman-Iranian relations, organized through thematic and comparative approaches. A related study on sectarianism in Ottoman-Iranian relations has already been published, while another examines violence against civilians and scorched-earth tactics in the Ottoman-Safavid wars and their long-term consequences for borderland regions. Additional projects include an article on Qajar Iran’s consolidation of power over Kurdish regions in the nineteenth century and a co-authored study on Britain’s Kurdistan Consulate (1865–1914) and the Ottoman government’s strategic use of the term Kurdistan in late imperial discourse.

Across all his research, Ates works to illuminate the human dimensions of empire, nationalism, and resistance—recovering voices often marginalized in state-centered histories and integrating them into the broader narrative of the modern Middle East.

 

Selected Publications

Books:

  • The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843-1914, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). (Turkish translation: Istanbul:KüreYayınları, 2020. Persian Translation forthcoming).
  • Osmanlıdan Cumhuriyete Bir Aydın:Tunalı Hilmi Bey, [An Intellectual from Empire to the Republic:Tunalı Hilmi Bey] (Istanbul: TarihVakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2009).

Articles:

  • “Historical Transformation of the Ottoman-Iranian Boundaries,” Idea of Iran, ed. Charles Melville, Bloomsbury Publishers. (Forthcoming, 2026).

  • “We the Nation: On Five Letters of Shaykh ‘Ubeydullah Nehrî,” Kurdish Studies Journal, 2 (2024), 3-32.

  • Ates-Vural Genç, Sabri. "Ottoman-Safavid Relations: A Religious or Political Rivalry" in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. Ed. David Ludden. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.)
  • “The End of Kurdish Autonomy: The Destruction of Kurdish Emirates in the Ottoman Empire,” in Hamit Bozarslan, et al. The Cambridge History of the Kurds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
  • “1639 Treaty of Zohab: Foundational Myth or Foundational Document,”Iranian Studies, vol. 52: 3-4, May-July 2019. (Translated into Persian, by Nasrollah Salehi, Faslnameh-e Tarikh-e Moaser-e Iran, 2023).
  • “Shi’i-Sunni Differences and the Emergence of the Ottoman-Iranian Border,” in The Journal of Turkish Studies (China), 1 (2018): 97-121.
  • “The Sheikh Ubeidullah Rebellion of 1880,” in Kurdish Question Revisited, ed. Gareth Stansfield, (London: Hurst & Co, 2017).
  • Co-Author, “General Introduction,” Records of the Kurds: Territory, Revolt, and Nationalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge Archive Editions, 2015).
  • “In the name of the caliph and the nation: The Sheikh Ubeidullah Rebellion of 1880-81” in Iranian Studies, (2014), Vol. 47, No. 5, 735-798.
  • Millet ve HalifeYolunda: Şeyh Ubeydullah-e Nehri Isyanı, I, II, III, Kürt Tarih Dergisi, Numbers. 7, 8, 9, 2013.
  • “Bones of Contention: Corpse Traffic and the Ottoman-Iranian Rivalry in Iraq” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, (Duke University Press), Vol. 30, No. 3, (2010), 512-532. Persian translation by Nazli Kamvari, in Irannameh 26, 2010, no. 1-2, pp. 1-30.] Turkish translation by Burcu Kurt, in Burcu Kurt and Ismail Yasayanlar, (eds.) Osmanlıdan Cumhuriyet’e Salgın Hastalıklarve Halk Sağlığı, (Istanbul: TarihVakfıYurtYayınları, 2017)
  • “Tunalı Hilmi Bey,” ToplumsalTarih, Sayı187, Temmuz 2009.
  • “Oryantalizmve Bizim Doğu” (Orientalism and “Our East”), Doğudan, Vol. 1, Issue 1, September 2007.
  • “The Ottoman Archives as a Source for the Study of Qajar Iran,”Iranian Studies, Volume 37, number 3, September 2004, 499-509. (Translated into Persian and published in Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (Faslnameh-e Tarikh-e Moaser-e Iran), No. 35/pp.79- 96.

Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

  • 2017-2018 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
  • 2016 Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics, Faculty Incentive Grant
  • 2015 SMU Center for Presidential History Writing Fellowship (Spring 2015)
  • 2014 Godbey Book Award, SMU
  • 2012-2013 Dean’s Research Council Grant, SMU
  • 2012-2013 Texas Project for Human Rights Education Fellow
  • 2009-10 Koç University (Istanbul), Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations Senior Residential Fellowship
  • 2009-10 ARIT (American Research Institute in Turkey), Joukowsky Family Foundation, John Freely Fellowship
  • 2009-10 University Research Council Grant, SMU
  • 2006 Middle East Studies Association, Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in Humanities
  • 2006 HOPE Teaching Award, SMU
  • 2003 Dean’s Pre-Dissertation Fellowship, New York University
  • 2001-2002 ARIT, Dissertation Fellowship
  • 2001 Dean’s Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, New York University
  • 2000 SCOS Fellowship, Cambridge University
Sabri Ates outdoors wearing a brown blazer