Major: Asian languages and civilizations
Thesis: “Ottoman Citizens: Citizenship and National Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire”
Summary: “Diversity, inclusion, innovation—are we talking a utopian society here? Nope: we’re talking the Ottoman Empire, just before it collapsed.”
Ottoman Constitution
“The Revival of the Ottoman” the woman is an Ottoman “Marianne,” the French goddess of liberty. Surrounded by Ottoman leaders, two revolutionaries break the chains. The stone reads “Viva la Constitution’ in Turkish and Greek.

Green says it was a pretty uncanny experience to write her thesis during the 2016 election, with its molten debates about nationalism and immigration.

A century and a half ago, “the Ottoman Empire was proposing innovative, exciting solutions for how to incorporate international people within a national project, without falling into hate,” says Green. This was a vast empire that encompassed Turkish Muslims, Arab Muslims, Greek Christians and Armenians, and was later carved into some 20 countries, from Albania to Egypt to Ukraine.

This policy of tolerance—called “Ottomanism”—was crushed by the empire’s dissolution after World War I. Unable to flower, it has been under-studied. But Green was determined to assess Ottomanism as if she didn’t know the denouement.

To that end, she worked out some parameters with Monica Ringer, professor of history and Asian languages and civilizations, “who is the best, by the way.”

Green relied on her growing proficiency in Turkish to read crucial primary sources. (She’d taken several courses through the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages.) These included the 1839 Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane (“Noble Edict of the Rose Chamber”), which proclaimed the equality of Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, and the 1876 constitution.

She also analyzed the 1875 novel Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi as a sort of thematic proxy. Translated into English by Ringer and Melih Levi ’15, it presents one character who over-embraces the West (he gambles, falls in with bad eggs) and another who gets the East-West mix just right.

Green comes from Albuquerque, N.M., one of the most diverse cities in the United States, so Ottomanism resonates with her personally as well as academically. In fact, she almost sounds wistful when she speaks about those long-ago advocates of Ottomanism: “They were really thinking beyond a narrow idea of nationalism.”