Interview with Farah Bazzi

Farah Bazzi is an 8th year Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history. Her work aims to bridge Mediterranean and Atlantic history with a focus on environmental thought, race, indigeneity, cosmology, cartography, and technologies of conquest. Her dissertation, tentatively titled The Alluring Aesthetic of Andalusī Nature: Conquest, Settlement Practices, and the Shaping of Racial Landscapes across the Early Modern Mediterranean and Beyond (1550-1666), investigates how Spanish, Ottoman, and Moroccan empires employed memories of al-Andalus, or Muslim Iberia, in their settlement, land appropriation, and environmental policies. In AY25-26, she is supported by Stanford Humanities Center’s Next Generations Scholar Program. 

What projects are you pursuing as a Next Generation Scholar at Stanford Humanities Center?

My work as a Next Generation Scholar has centered on bringing my dissertation project into its final shape while also developing my Dutch-language book.

My dissertation e project examines how early modern Mediterranean empires imagined the relationship between people, religion, and land as a single integrated field. I am especially interested in how displaced populations were understood not only as people in motion, but as bearers of particular forms of cultivation, memory, faith, and environmental knowledge. This year, I  used the SHC’s intellectual community to write the final two chapters of the dissertation and, just as importantly, to think about the project as a whole: what its central claims are, what kind of intervention it makes, and how its different archives and languages speak to one another. The dissertation’s central case is the displacement of the Moriscos from Spain between 1609 and 1614 and their resettlement across the Maghrib and the Ottoman world. Through this case, I develop a concept I call “transplantable geography”: the idea that a population’s religious, cultural, and ecological character was imagined to travel with it and to reshape the landscapes it entered.

Alongside the dissertation, I have also been working on Het Vluchtelingentijdperk (The Age of Refugeehood), a book that brings my research on displacement, exile, and belonging into conversation with my own family history as refugees from the Lebanese Civil War. Whereas the dissertation asks how early modern empires theorized displacement, the book asks what it means to inherit displacement: how refugeehood continues after arrival, how it is transmitted across generations, and how the experience of leaving home under duress reshapes one’s relationship to language, memory, and belonging.

How did you become interested in displacement and migration in the early modern Mediterranean?

My interest grew out of a tension I kept noticing between two things I deeply cared about. As a historian, I was drawn to the early modern Mediterranean because it resists the neat categories we inherit from the modern nation-state. Religion, ethnicity, territory, language, and political loyalty were entangled in ways that can look strange from our vantage point, but that also reveal how artificial many of our modern separations are. People did not simply belong to places; they were imagined to shape them, transform them, corrupt them, cultivate them, or carry their memory elsewhere.

At the same time, as someone shaped by Lebanese and Dutch histories and raised between languages and places, questions of belonging and dislocation were never abstract to me. My parents and I were refugees who fled the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War. Their experience taught me that refugeehood is not simply something that happens and then ends when one reaches a safe place. Leaving home under duress is not an event one ever fully processes. It remains in the body, in family memory, in silence, in fear, in gratitude, and in the way one teaches children what safety means. It is passed on.

When I first encountered the Morisco expulsion of the 17th century, I found the case both devastating and intellectually arresting. What struck me was not only that a population could be expelled after generations of life in Spain, but that the expulsion was justified through a claim about where they truly belonged. The Moriscos were treated as if baptism, language, labor, and long residence could not overcome a deeper and supposedly ineradicable attachment to another geography. They were made foreign to the very landscapes they had helped cultivate.

That recognition pushed me to ask how early modern actors themselves theorized displacement. I became interested in migration not only as something that happened to people, but  as something that empires thought (and governed?) with. Early  modern Moriscos allowed me to see displacement as a site where ideas about land, religion, race, labor, and belonging became visible all at once.

And you articulate some of these observations in your dissertation, “The Alluring Aesthetic of Andalusī Nature: Conquest, Settlement Practices, and the Shaping of Racial Landscapes across the Early Modern Mediterranean and Beyond, 1550–1666.”

Yes, I explore how early modern Mediterranean empires shared a conceptual grammar in which religion, people, and land were imagined as mutually constitutive. Difference was not understood as purely theological, ethnic, political, or legal. It was also environmental. People were thought to belong to certain soils, climates, crops, cities, and forms of cultivation.

The Morisco displacement  allows me to trace this grammar across radically different imperial settings from the mid-16th century to the mid-17th century: In Habsburg Spain, Moriscos were portrayed as a contaminating population whose religious difference could not be erased by conversion. In the Ottoman Empire, some were received as useful Muslim cultivators whose skills could be redeployed across frontier and agricultural zones. In the North African regencies, Andalusī refugees became part of local worlds of scholarship, urban life, agriculture, and memory. Each context imagined the relationship between Andalusī people and Andalusī nature differently, yet all shared the assumption that land and people shaped one another.

The dissertation moves across five chapters. It begins with the diasporic construction of Andalusī geography in Arabic texts, where al-Andalus becomes not only a lost territory but an aesthetic, scholarly, and ecological inheritance. It then turns to Ottoman geographical writing, where al-Andalus appears as a place both remembered and increasingly unreachable: a geography of irretrievability. The middle chapters examine Morisco settlement in Tunisia and Algeria, where Andalusī refugees reshaped towns, agricultural zones, and local ecologies. The project then follows Moriscos to the Spanish imperial edges, including North African presidios and the Americas, where anxieties about their identity reappeared in colonial contexts. The final chapter returns to post-conquest Iberia, reading Morisco land, agriculture, and textual memory through figures such as Miguel de Luna and Jaime Bleda.

At its heart, my dissertation asks how empires made landscapes racial. It shows that early modern racialization did not operate only through blood, lineage, or religion, but also through ideas about cultivation, fertility, beauty, labor, and environmental capacity. The “alluring aesthetic” of Andalusī nature was never innocent. It was a way of imagining a people through the landscapes they were said to create, and a way of imagining landscapes through the people believed to belong to them.

Who were the Moriscos?

The Moriscos were the Muslims of Spain who were forcibly converted to Christianity in the early sixteenth century and then expelled en masse between 1609 and 1614. Although they were legally Christian subjects, they were repeatedly treated as inwardly and ineradicably Muslim, as if conversion had changed their official status but not their essence.

They are such a revealing group because they sit at the seam between categories. They were Christian by baptism, Muslim by suspicion, Spanish by long residence, and foreign by imperial imagination. They were agriculturally indispensable yet politically intolerable. They were intimate to the landscapes of Valencia, Aragon, and Granada, yet imagined as belonging naturally elsewhere, especially to North Africa.

Following the Moriscos allows us to watch several empires reason about the same population at once. Spain expelled them as a contaminant whose presence threatened the religious and political body of the kingdom. Ottoman authorities could frame some Moriscos as Muslim cultivators whose skills might be strategically placed in underpopulated or agriculturally valuable zones. Maghribī societies absorbed them through existing networks of scholarship, commerce, urban settlement, and agricultural practice. The same people therefore appear differently depending on the imperial gaze: traitors, refugees, cultivators, settlers, scholars, converts, Muslims, Spaniards, Andalusīs.

This is why the Moriscos  force us to see that early modern empires did not merely govern territory. They governed relationships between bodies and landscapes. They asked who could make land productive, who could corrupt it, who could inherit it, who could be removed from it, and who could be made to belong elsewhere. Through the Moriscos, we can see that religious difference was never separable from questions of land, labor, environment, and imperial power.

How has the Morisco expulsion shaped the early modern Mediterranean?

The expulsion was not only a removal of people. It was a reorganization of landscapes.

In Spain, the departure of Morisco cultivators left agricultural regions, particularly in Valencia and Aragon, depopulated and economically disrupted. These were not merely demographic losses. They were perceived as losses of expertise: irrigation knowledge, crop management, terracing practices, and forms of intensive cultivation associated with Morisco labor. Spanish polemicists had often depicted Moriscos as dangerous precisely because they were so embedded in the land. After their expulsion, the Spanish Crown and local authorities had to confront the material consequences of removing a population whose labor had sustained entire rural ecologies.

On the receiving side, Morisco resettlement was frequently framed in explicitly agricultural and ecological terms. Ottoman administrative logic, visible in a 1613 firman of Sultan Ahmed I, treated Morisco cultivators as a population that could be placed where the empire needed productive Muslim settlers. In the regencies of Tunis and Algiers, Moriscos founded or reshaped towns such as Testour, Tebourba, Soliman, and Zaghouan, bringing with them techniques, crops, architectural forms, and systems of water management associated with Andalusī life.

What interests me the most is that contemporaries did not describe this only as migration. They often imagined it as the movement of a whole environmental capacity. The Moriscos were thought to bring Andalusī fertility with them, Andalusī cultivation, Andalusī refinement, even an Andalusī way of inhabiting land. Their displacement therefore became an episode in which human movement and environmental transformation were understood as two faces of the same process.

That is why I think the Morisco expulsion helps us rethink environmental history. It shows that landscapes are not only shaped by climate, economy, or state policy, but also by forced migration, memory, and the imperial classification of human beings. The movement of people could be imagined as the movement of ecological knowledge. And the loss of people could be experienced as the loss of a landscape’s vitality.

You are working with multiple languages and archives. Have you encountered any challenges during your research? 

Yes. The project is built on sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Spanish, French, and Dutch, and one of its central challenges is that none of these archives speaks in exactly the same terms. I work with Ottoman chancery records such as the Mühimme Defteri registers; Arabic geographical and biographical literature including al-Maqqarī and Ibn Ghālib; Spanish polemical, legal, and administrative texts; French missionary travel accounts such as those of Francisco Ximénez on Tunisian Morisco settlements; and Dutch diplomatic reports, including those of the ambassador Cornelius Haga. I have also incorporated colonial materials from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville for my chapter on the Americas and from local Valencian archives for the chapter on resettlement after the expulsion.

The challenges are partly philological and partly conceptual. A single term can shift meaning as it crosses linguistic and imperial boundaries. Categories that seem familiar in one archive become unstable in another. I am especially interested in moments when the archive misbehaves: when a term like mudajjanīn appears in an unexpected context, when a chancery document groups together places that do not seem geographically coherent to us, or when a word that appears to designate religion also carries assumptions about labor, land, and lineage.

One recurring puzzle, for example, has been how to understand Ottoman references to settlement zones that seem geographically anomalous, such as Kars appearing alongside the Çukurova region in discussions of Morisco settlement. Rather than treating these as simple errors, I ask what they reveal about how Ottoman administrators imagined space: not only as cartographic location, but as a field of strategic placement, fiscal need, frontier management, and religious belonging.

Working across so many archives means that I am constantly translating not only words, but assumptions. Each documentary tradition has its own sense of what matters, what can be said, what must be hidden, and what can be taken for granted. The hardest part of the project is also the most rewarding: holding these differences together without flattening them into one imperial story.

Your Het Vluchtelingentijdperk interweaves your research with your personal experience. What motivated you to write in this genre, and how does it differ from your academic work?

At its core, Het Vluchtelingentijdperk asks what it means to inherit a history of flight. It is about the long afterlife of leaving, and about the strange ways the past continues to travel inside the people who were forced to move. 

I began writing the book because there were questions my scholarship raised that I could not fully answer within the conventions of a dissertation. When you spend years reading documents about people who were uprooted, expelled, renamed, resettled, and made to belong elsewhere, you begin to feel the limits of analytic distance. The archive can tell us how states classified people, where they moved them, what they feared about them, and what uses they imagined for them. But it cannot always tell us what it means to live after the rupture.

My parents and I were refugees who fled the Lebanese Civil War, and that history has never felt separate from my intellectual life. Refugeehood is not simply something that happens to you and then ends when you find a “safe” place. It becomes part of the atmosphere of family life. It is passed on in stories, but also in silences; in gratitude, but also in vigilance; in the desire to belong, but also in the knowledge that belonging can be revoked.

The book allows me to place my and my family’s  inherited experiences beside the early modern histories I study. It asks what connects the age of the Moriscos to our own age of refugeehood, and where the analogy breaks down. I do not want to collapse the past and present into one another. The Moriscos lived in a world very different from ours. But I am interested in the recurring fantasy that displaced people can be sorted into proper places, that states can decide where someone truly belongs, that safety is the same as arrival, and that exile ends once movement stops.

The genre is more forgiving than academic writing because it permits ambiguity, association, and feeling. But it is also more difficult because there is nowhere to hide behind the archive. In the dissertation, I can make an argument through documents. In the book, I have to ask what those documents do to me, and why I was drawn to them in the first place.

My training as a historian is what makes the personal writing possible rather than merely confessional. It has taught me how to read silence, how to distrust tidy narratives, how to situate a single life within larger structures of power and movement. Writing in Dutch adds another layer. Dutch is one of my languages, but not the language of my scholarship. It returns me to a more intimate and less professionalized register, to a language tied to childhood, migration, and the effort to become legible in a new place. That friction is part of the book’s form. It is a book about displacement written in a language that itself carries the traces of displacement.