The project consisted of four work packages. In the first work package (WP1), I had set out the goal to attend training courses at the University of Copenhagen as well as the organization of a workshop. In the second (WP2), I planned for two data collection trips to archives in the United States, while the third (WP3) consisted of the actual analysis of the collected data and the writing of two articles and a book chapter. The fourth package (WP4) related to the dissemination activities, where I set the goal of attending and presenting my project at two conferences as well as at a seminar at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS).
Regrettably, the coming of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown of the University of Copenhagen upended much of the planning and objectives of WP 1 and 4. The ban against international travel and the cancellation of many academic conferences in 2020 was a risk that nobody had anticipated at the beginning of the project. It forced me to reconsider large parts of the project. Fortunately, I had already collected most of the data needed during my first trip to the archives held at Columbia University in New York in the fall of 2019, and I was later able to access material from archives elsewhere in the US through the help of dedicated archivists once they were allowed back into their workplace. Since the international conferences I originally envisioned writing papers for that could be turned into journal articles were cancelled, and the data collected from the US archives yielded richer insights into the subject than previously expected, I changed the objectives for WP3, in close consultation with my scientific supervisor. Instead of two journal articles and a book chapter, I decided to write a monograph, intended for the book series at Palgrave Macmillan that my supervisor Catharina Raudvere edits. The manuscript is now completed and ready to be submitted on 7 January 2022, with a likely publication date toward the end of the year. In addition to that, I have presented my project at the seminar of the research group The Many Roads in Modernity at the University of Copenhagen on 7 April, 2021, with Professor Resat Kasaba of the University of Washington as an invited commentator via Zoom. After this very successful seminar, I submitted my book proposal to Palgrave Macmillan, which led to a contract after a similarily positive anonymous peer review. Shortly after, I received an invitation by email by Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dr. Khatchig Mouradian to contribute a chapter of an upcoming handbook on the legacies of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War in the Middle East. Two workshops (on Zoom and, if possible, at Columbia University, New York) relating to this book project are scheduled for February and June, 2022. In addition to that, I have presented the project along with its preliminary results to fellow historians from Södertörn University, Sweden, and Åbo Akademi, Finland, at a digital workshop in May 2022. I also plan to disseminate the results of the project at the 30th Congress of Nordic Historians in Gothenburg in August 2022.
