Mitchell Bacci (HMES)

Mitch Bacci is a PhD candidate in Harvard's joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program. His research and teaching explore the social and political histories of state formation, informal economies, psychoactive substances, and public health.

His dissertation, “Altered States: Cannabis, Opiates, and the Politics of State Formation in the Late Ottoman and Interwar Eastern Mediterranean, 1876–1937,” examines the end of empire and the emergence of the state system through a connected and comparative history of drug trafficking. This project shows how the sale and suppression of narcotics shaped nascent notions of the nation-state, national economy, and national subject in Anatolia and Egypt. His next project studies contemporaneous opiate epidemics in British-occupied Egypt and early Republican Turkey as manifestations of the sickness and trauma that accompanied imperial collapse, colonial occupation, and nation-state formation. His research draws on extensive archival work in Egypt, Turkey, France, the UK, and the US, and has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, among others.

Before coming to Harvard, Mitch earned a BA in Islamic and Asian history from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas, Austin. He is currently a visiting scholar at Istanbul University's Department of Political Science and International Relations.