Rate My Professor Lukas Kieser

Hans-Lukas Kieser is an Associate Professor and Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Science (History section) at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and a member of the Centre for the History of Violence. He earned his PhD and Master of Arts in History from the University of Basel, Switzerland, where his doctoral thesis, The Squandered Peace: Missionaries, Ethnicity and the State in the Eastern Provinces of Turkey 1839–1938, was published by Turkish publisher Iletişim and is now in its fourth edition. Kieser's distinguished career spans multiple institutions: Adjunct Professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich since 2011, Professor at the University of Freiburg (2008–2009) and University of Bamberg (2005–2006), Privatdozent at the University of Zurich (2004–2011), and Lecturer and Researcher there (1999–2004). He has held invited professorships at Stanford University (2010), University of Michigan (2008), Bilgi University in Istanbul (2006), and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (2004). In 2013, he received an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship at the University of Newcastle for his project "War, Violence, and Apocalyptic-Millenarianism in the Middle East: Talat Pasha and the Foundation of Modern Turkey, 1874-1921."

Kieser's research specializes in the demise of the Ottoman Empire amid the First World War, the history of violence, interactions involving modern religious factors like apocalyptic perspectives, state formation, political violence, genocide, Ottoman and Turkish history (including Kurdish, Alevi, and Armenian histories), and World War I. His influential publications include Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (2018), World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (2015), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism (2019), Turkey's Violent Formation: New Social Contracts at the End of the Ottoman Empire (2024), After the Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience (2023, with S. Bayraktar and K. Mouradian), and The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy (2025, edited with K. Mouradian). Kieser was awarded the President of the Republic of Armenia Prize in 2017 for his contributions to Armenian Genocide history. He serves as an Advisory Board member for the Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation in Berlin, was President of the Research Foundation Switzerland-Turkey (2006–2016), and contributes to international committees on genocide studies. His work is essential for understanding contemporary Middle East conflicts rooted in unresolved Ottoman legacies.