Ellis Garey is a Ph.D. candidate in History & Middle Eastern Studies. A social and intellectual historian of labor in the late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman modern Middle East, her research explores issues related to social transformation and political subjectivity.
Her dissertation, “Becoming Workers: The Question of Labor in Greater Syria, 1880-1936,” argues that it was through specific social struggles that the “worker” took shape not only as an administrative category, but also as a locus for claiming rights — one that people drew on in order to identify themselves, understand the world around them, and advance socioeconomic and political visions.
With the support of an ANAMED (Koç University) Doctoral Fellowship, the American Research Institute in Turkey Fellowship, the NYU Provost’s Graduate Research Initiative, and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, she has conducted archival research in Turkey, France, and Lebanon. She has published a short article related to her dissertation in the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies.