Stefan Winter

Stefan Winter has been professor of history (professeur régulier, Département d’histoire) at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) since 2004. He also serves as director of the Groupe d’études turques et ottomanes (GÉTO). He was invited professor (Directeur d’études invité) at both the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2007 and 2012, respectively. In 2014-15 he was associate researcher at the History Department of Bilkent University in Ankara.

Stefan Winter is a Canadian historian specialising in the study of Ottoman Syria. His research revolves around Ottoman administrative policies toward the Shi‘i and ‘Alawi communities as well as Bedouin and Kurdish principalities in northern Syria and southern Anatolia, and he takes a generally Marxian approach to show how the co-optation or creation of so-called “tribal” elites by the Ottoman state authorities and their economic expansion under the twin impulse of European colonialism and Ottoman administrative reform, rather than their essential sectarian or ethnic identities, determined these groups’ fate in the early modern period. His first book, The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1788, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010; his second book, A History of the ‘Alawis: From Medieval Syria to the Turkish Republic, 947-1938 was published by Princeton University Press in 2016. The latter was awarded the Fuat Köprülü Book Prize by the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA) in 2017. He also co-edited, together with Mafalda Ade, the collective volume Aleppo and its Hinterland in the Ottoman Period/Alep et sa province à l’époque ottomane with E.J. Brill in 2019.

EHESS 2012: http://iismm.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1094/affiche_winter.pdf

SSA award: http://www.ou.edu/ssa/p-prizes/2002.htm

Born into a German-speaking family established in Québec since 1970, Stefan Winter completed his school education with a Diplôme d’études collégiales (DEC) in Commerce at CÉGEP St.-Lawrence in Sainte-Foy before studying at the University of Toronto (BA, Middle East and Islamic Studies, 1994), Universität Erlangen (MA, Political Science, 1996), the Institut français d’études arabes in Damascus, Bilkent University in Ankara, and the University of Chicago (PhD, History, 2002). His thesis entitled The Shiite Emirates of Ottoman Syria, Mid-17th—Mid-18th Century was awarded the prize for best doctoral dissertation by the Syrian Studies Association in 2002.