Ariel Salzmann is associate professor of Islamic and World History at Queen's University Canada. She specialises in global capitalism, the Ottoman Empire, political systems and state formation.
Salzmann received her PhD from Columbia University in 1995. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Measures ofEmpire: Tax Farmers and the Ottoman Ancien Régime, 1695-1807. [1] Before her appointment at Queen's University, she taught at the Pratt Institute, the University of Cincinnati, and New York University.
Salzmann published the book Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire:Rival Paths to the Modern State with Brill in 2004. [2] This book re-examined the political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the French Revolution from an Ottoman perspective. Her journal article, published in Politics & Society (1993), won the Turkish Studies Association's Ömer Lutfi Barkan Article Prize: 'An Ancien Régime Revisted: Privatization and Political Economy in the 18th Century Ottoman Empire'. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities award in 1988, and an Americal Research Institute in Turkey Fellowship in 1999. [3] She held a Senior Fellowship at the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations of Koç University in Istanbul in 2011. She was the first Canadian to be awarded a Fellowship at the centre. [4] Salzmann's book The Exclusionary West: Medieval Minorities and the Making of Modern Europe is forthcoming with Hurst in 2026. [5]