Position: Professor
Field: Gambling and Lotteries, Intoxicants, Public Health, Social and Cultural, Women and Gender
Region: Middle East
Office: 213 Old Horticulture
Email: evered@msu.edu
Phone: (517) 884-4917
Emine Evered (Ph.D., University of Arizona, 2005) is Professor of History at Michigan State University, specializing in the modern Middle East with a particular focus on the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. Her scholarship explores how everyday practices, cultural norms, and social regulations became intertwined with questions of state power, national identity, and modernity. Her first monograph, Empire and Education Under the Ottomans: Politics, Reform and Resistance from the Tanzimat to the Young Turks (I.B. Tauris, 2012; paperback: Bloomsbury, 2019), examines the transformation of education as both a tool of state authority and a site of resistance. By situating Ottoman educational reforms within wider social, political, and international contexts, the book demonstrates how schools functioned as critical arenas where issues of identity, loyalty, and imperial reform were contested.
Her second book, Prohibition in Turkey: Alcohol and the Politics of Identity (University of Texas Press, 2024), extends this interest in the politics of everyday regulation by investigating the history of alcohol production, consumption, and prohibition in Turkey. It shows how debates over alcohol became central to defining morality, modernity, and national belonging, while also connecting Turkey’s experiences to wider global histories of prohibition and regulation. Follow the link for a podcast interview about the book: https://newbooksnetwork.com/prohibition-in-turkey
Beyond her monographs, she has published widely and collaboratively with fellow geographer Kyle T. Evered on themes of public health and disease and the cultural politics of intoxicants in the Middle East. Follow the link for a complete list of her publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RfPuFoMAAAAJ&hl=en
Her current project, Lucky Numbers: The Role of Regulated Gambling in Turkish Nation-Building (19th–20th Century), supported by a Fulbright fellowship, explores the history of the Turkish national lottery as both an economic instrument and a cultural project.