I’m drawn to the small, unglamorous stories—of workers, animals, landscapes, and materials—that quietly reveal how larger political and economic systems actually function. I follow the mundane and the marginal until I have a picture of how power functions in a given space and time. Rather than align my historical understanding with extant narratives, my research aims to theorize from below and generate new historiographical forms. Carrying this onus, my dissertation, titled “The Imperial Mines: The Political Ecology and Economy of Extraction in the Ottoman Empire, 1720-1820,” pieces together the stories of ore-bearing rocks, mining shafts, forests, and intrusive groundwater with those of miners, artisans, sarrafs, charcoal makers, militias, rebels, and semi-nomadic mule drivers across Asia Minor.
My research has been generously kept afloat by the American Research Institute in Turkey, Fulbright-Hays, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC).
I am a co-convener of the interdisciplinary Minescapes Working Group, which meets monthly to workshop papers and presentations on extraction across different times and places.
If you have any questions, would like to learn more about my research, or have an idea for a collaboration, please email me at derenertas@g.harvard.edu.
I am a historian, visual artist, dabbler in journalistic writing, chess enthusiast, occasional podcast host, and classical guitar player based between the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. and Istanbul, Turkey. I was born on the Asian side of Istanbul in the final decade of the last millennium and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island amid the aftershocks of the 2008 global financial crisis. I was a QuestBridge Scholar and went to Wesleyan University for my undergraduate education. There, I earned my BA in the College of Social Studies, with High Honors but not summa cum laude because I challenged myself with an advanced calculus class I had no business taking. Nevertheless, my undergraduate thesis on the Gezi Park Protests won me an award and a lifetime of curiosity about how the past inflects the present. In 2016, a few months after graduation, I became a History Teacher at the quirky Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, NY. Teaching sleepy-eyed eighth graders about the “Gunpowder Empires” at 8:30 in the morning confirmed my desire to pursue graduate studies, and I enrolled at the New School for Social Research for my MA in Historical Studies.
After a few conferences, several jobs, and many applications later, I became a PhD Candidate in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University. Ever expansive in my research interests, and easily seduced by a laguna in the literature, my explorations in the Ottoman State Archives led me to a group of mines in Eastern Asia Minor. Over the last couple of years, I have been researching and trying to understand the silver, lead, gold, and copper mines of Keban and Ergani. To do so, I not only became proficient in various paleographic traditions in the Ottoman Empire, but also learned geological jargon, examined mining sites worldwide, and persuaded folks (more times than I care to admit) in Maden and Keban that my questions did not require the gendarmerie's intervention. I learned Kurmancî Kurdish and Western Armenian, and traveled across Europe and Turkey to various archives.
