Contact
Faisal Husain is an assistant professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University. He specializes in the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire with a geographical focus on its eastern provinces in Anatolia and modern-day Iraq. His first book, Rivers of the Sultan, examined the role of the Tigris and Euphrates in the establishment of Ottoman state institutions within the drainage basin between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. At the Rachel Carson Center, he will start a new book project, an environmental history of Ottoman frontier expansion into the arid zone. He is currently a member of the editorial board of Global Environment.
RCC Research Project: An Environmental History of the Ottoman Arid Frontier, 1500–1700
Selected Publications:
- “Water for the Saints of Baghdad: The Hydrology of a Sacred Ottoman Geography.” Journal of Early Modern History 25, no. 4 (2021): 319–344.
- “Sediment of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers: An Early Modern Perspective.” Water History 13, no. 1 (2021): 13–32.
- Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- “Changes in the Euphrates River: Ecology and Politics in a Rural Ottoman Periphery, 1687–1702.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 47, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 1–25.
- “In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad.” Environmental History 19, no. 4 (2014): 638–664.