Hratch Kestenian is a historian specializing in medicine and the modern Middle East, with a focus on the intersection of public health, empire, and migration. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation titled The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis and the Medicalization of Ottoman Society, 1800–1922. His research, drawing on Ottoman-Turkish, Armenian, French, and Arabic sources, examines how disease influenced modern governance, professionalization, and social hierarchies. Kestenian’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Leibniz Institute for European History. His current book project, TB or Not to Be: Empire and Medicalization, builds on his dissertation’s findings to place tuberculosis within broader histories of knowledge exchange and state formation.

Research Project

Kestenian’s postdoctoral project explores Armenian medical networks between 1816 and 1926, using over 300 dissertations written by men and women from the Ottoman and Russian empires. Students from cities like Istanbul, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Tiflis studied at universities in Paris, Montpellier, Geneva, Lausanne, and Pisa before returning to practice throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. These dissertations—along with medical journals and multilingual archival records in Armenian, Ottoman-Turkish, French, and Arabic—offer a unique perspective on how Armenian physicians engaged with urgent debates on infectious diseases, psychiatry, hygiene, and surgery while adapting to new professional and social roles within imperial and diasporic settings.

The significance of this project lies in reconstructing the intellectual and institutional ties that positioned Armenians as active contributors to global medical histories. It highlights the importance of observation and practice in dissertation research, tracing how overseas medical training influenced local approaches to disease and public health. Additionally, it emphasizes gender by recovering the contributions of Armenian women physicians, placing them alongside their male counterparts. By viewing the Mediterranean as a vibrant crossroads, the study redefines Armenian medical networks as vital mediators in the exchange of knowledge, migration, and modern state development.