Zavier Wingham is a PhD candidate in the joint program for History and Middle East and Islamic Studies. His dissertation research explores how changing Ottoman elite conceptions of race, slavery, and blackness in the Ottoman Empire contributed to new forms of racialization of enslaved and manumitted Africans between the 1840s and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, as well as how Africans in the Ottoman empire experienced these processes of racialization and sought to create new kinds of community and ways of living.