Aimee M. Genell

My research research focuses on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and its entanglements with Europe in the area of international law and international relations. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2013 and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Security Studies at Yale University. I am an Assistant Professor of History at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.

My monograph, Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandates System in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2026), traces the Ottoman roots of the post-imperial political order through an analysis of the inter-imperial contest over Ottoman autonomous provinces. I argue against a dominant historical narrative that views 1919 as the decisive break in the Middle East. Instead, I show that long before the First World War, Ottoman autonomous provinces, Egypt above all, established a new type of non-sovereign imperial administration. These autonomous provinces provided one of the main models for the League of Nations mandates in the post-Ottoman Middle East. More broadly, the Ottoman Empire contributed to and was among the key testing grounds for enduring political and administrative experiments in the post-imperial international order.