A People without a Landscape: Maghāriba, Andalusīs, and the Naming of the Morisco Diaspora in the Ottoman East

Farah Bazzi is a historian of the early modern Mediterranean and its global connections whose research moves between the Ottoman and Iberian worlds. Her 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)', examines what became of Andalusī land—as both idea and practice—following the Morisco expulsion of 1609–14. Working across Spanish, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Aljamiado, and Dutch sources, she traces how al-Andalus was represented and reimagined by Andalusī, Maghribi, and Ottoman scholars, as well as by displaced communities across the western and eastern Mediterranean. The dissertation argues that al-Andalus endured not only as the memory of a lost homeland but also as a transplantable geography: a set of spatial, environmental, and cultural expectations that shaped how migrants interpreted new landscapes and how Spanish and Ottoman authorities came to understand and classify the people who inhabited them in racial terms.

Her research is forthcoming in Renaissance Studies and in an edited volume from the ERC project A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections. During the 2025–26 academic year, Bazzi was also a Next Generation Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center.

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This event is hosted by the Eurasian Empires Research Workshop.