Fredrick Walter Lorenz

Fredrick Walter Lorenz is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research examines the late Ottoman Empire through the interconnected histories of migration, displacement, settler colonialism, and imperial expansion across the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Balkans. Drawing on archival sources in multiple Middle Eastern and European languages, his work explores how refugees, settlers, Indigenous communities, and imperial officials transformed landscapes, agriculture, and political authority during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of World History, Global Food History, Mashriq & Mahjar, and Archivum Ottomanicum. His research has been supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and numerous university research fellowships and awards.

Professor Lorenz teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, migration, colonialism, and North African history. His teaching emphasizes primary sources, archival research, and transregional approaches to the study of empire and mobility.

He is currently completing his first book, Ottoman Settlerism: Empire, Migration, and Settler Colonialism in Late Ottoman Libya. Drawing on extensive multilingual archival research, the book argues that migration, settlement, and demographic transformation were fundamental technologies of Ottoman imperial expansion. In doing so, it repositions the Ottoman Empire within global histories of empire, migration, and settler colonialism while placing Ottoman North Africa in conversation with other nineteenth-century projects of territorial colonization and frontier expansion.

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

In Progress

• Ottoman Settlerism: Empire, Migration, and Settler Colonialism in Late Ottoman Libya

Journal Articles

• “A Mobile Boundary: Empires, Nomads, and Refugees between Tripolitania and Tunisia.” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 12, no. 12 (2025): 28–56.

• “A Taste of Empire: Sacred Bread, Refugees, and the Making of Ottoman Imperial Subjects.” Global Food History 12, no. 1 (2025): 114–133.

• “Agents, Ambassadors, and Imams: Ottoman-British Transimperialism in the Cape of Good Hope, 1862-1869.” Journal of World History 34, no. 2 (2023): 241–276.

• “‘The Second Egypt’: Cretan Refugees, Agricultural Development, and Frontier Expansion in Ottoman Cyrenaica, 1897-1904.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no. 1 (2021): 89–105.”

Book Reviews

• Review of Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State in Mahjar and Mashriq: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 12, no. 1 (2025): 153–156.

• Review of Sievert Henning, Tripolitanien und Bengasi um 1900: Wissen, Vermittlung und politische Kommunikation in Archivum Ottomanicum 40 (2023): 266–270.