About Melanie Tanielian

Melanie Tanielian is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her 2018 monograph, The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid and World War I in the Middle East, tells the story of how the Ottoman home front grappled with total war and how it sought to mitigate starvation and sickness through relief activities. Using Ottoman Beirut as a case study, the book examines the wartime activities of the city’s municipal, philanthropic, and religious institutions and organizations, as well as international and state agencies. It reveals a dynamic politics of provisioning that was central to civilian experiences in the war, as well as to the Middle Eastern political landscape that emerged post-war. Currently, she is working on a mono- graph preliminarily titled “Commodifying Kindness: German Humanitarian Fantasies, Utopias, and Practices in the Eastern Mediterranean (1896-1933).”