Diana Yayloyan

My dissertation examines how contests over mountainous terrain, mobility, and property regimes across the Ottoman/Turkish eastern Anatolia and Russian/Soviet Transcaucasus borderland between 1870 and 1940 shaped both the everyday lives of local communities and broader processes of imperial and post-imperial transformation. Bringing together social and environmental history with scholarship on borderlands and fugitivity, it treats this region as a connected ecological space, linked by mountains, forests, seasonal labor routes, flight, fugitivity, and transhumant movement, rather than by the administrative boundaries imposed by states. Methodologically, I combine multilingual state and non-state archives with oral testimonies to reconstruct both the state-produced category of fugitive and the lived practices from below that evaded or subverted these categories. Before joining Georgetown, I worked as an indexer for Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection, which has shaped my methodological commitment to bringing state and non-state written sources into conversation with oral testimonies.