This September, Fredrick Walter Lorenz joins the history department as assistant professor of Middle Eastern history. A historian of the late Ottoman Empire, Lorenz examines migration, displacement, settler colonialism, and imperial expansion across the 19th- and early 20th-century Mediterranean. His research explores how refugees, settlers, Indigenous communities, and imperial officials reshaped landscapes, agricultural systems, and political authority across the Ottoman world.
Lorenz received his PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was awarded the Thomas E. Lifka Prize for the Most Outstanding Dissertation. His scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of World History, Archivum Ottomanicum, Global Food History journal, and Mashriq & Mahjar. Drawing on sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, French, German, Italian, and English, his research traces the transregional connections that linked the Ottoman Empire to Africa, Europe, and the wider Mediterranean.
At UMass Amherst, Lorenz will teach courses on the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, migration, empire, nationalism, and the histories of colonialism and state formation. His teaching emphasizes primary sources and archival research while encouraging students to think critically about empire, mobility, and historical change across regions.
Lorenz is currently completing his first book, “Ottoman Settlerism: Empire, Migration, and Settler Colonialism in Late Ottoman Libya.” The book argues that the Ottoman Empire pursued a distinctive form of settler colonialism in Libya, demonstrating how refugee settlement, agricultural colonization, and environmental transformation became central instruments of imperial expansion. By placing the Ottoman experience alongside other colonial empires, it reframes the late Ottoman Empire within broader global histories of settler colonialism, migration, and empire.