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Georgetown360

Fatma Esen

Fatma Esen joined the PhD program in 2022. She studies the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea region with a focus on fish. She mainly questions whether it is possible to write the history of fish from the perspective of the fish itself, using imperial archives—an approach that opens up intersections between critical animal studies and environmental history. Her research particularly focuses on local practices in fishing communities and how they changed after the commodification of fish, the shifting human-fish relationships under capitalist incentives and during modern state formation, and the effects of climate on fish populations. Her ongoing work explores the political ecology of fisheries, indebtedness and the privatization of water space, technological advancements, and the tension between the narratives of fisheries and the lived experiences of fish under conditions of overfishing. Her focus initially emerged from a seemingly simple question found in the yearbooks of Trabzon: how anchovy, once food for the coastal poor, was intended to be transformed into a canned food project that ultimately failed. Being from the Black Sea region herself, she grounds these questions in her own lived experiences. Currently, she is conducting archival and field research in Karaköy, Poyrazköy, and Rumelihisarı in Istanbul, as well as in Sürmene and Akçaabat in the fisheries of Trabzon. Esen enjoys long walks and never-ending conversations about her homeland, the Black Sea.