Henry Misa, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at The Ohio State University, has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship by the U.S. Department of Education, International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office. With Fulbright-Hays support, Misa will conduct research for his dissertation, titled “Adapting to the Medieval Megadrought in Transoxiana-Uzbekistan,” in Uzbekistan for twelve months.
Paleo-environmental science shows that a megadrought, lasting from the ninth through the eleventh centuries, stressed the societies of medieval Central Asia, including those located in present-day Uzbekistan. Misa will investigate how these pre-modern societies adapted, or failed to adapt, to this drought. He will also examine how the structure of their political and economic systems affected the ways that they interacted with local ecologies during this drought period.
“I examine this question through two case studies focusing on the Samanids and the Qarakhanids. I hypothesize that the sedentary Samanid Amirate (819-1005) was unable to adapt to the dry conditions because it depended on agricultural taxation revenue, whereas the mobile pastoralist Qarakhanid Qaghanate (999-1212) was better positioned to construct a viable political economy by integrating ancient local knowledge of mountain resources and ecologies,” Misa explained.
Misa’s project will use extensive archival and field research in Uzbekistan using multilanguage sources, including primary sources in Arabic, Persian, and Turkic as well as secondary sources and archaeological reports in Uzbek and Russian, to test his hypothesis. The results will contribute to the fields of Central Asian history and area studies, economic history, and global environmental history. Scholarship on premodern climate history provides urgently needed historical context and fresh insights for coping with the present global environmental crisis.
Misa earned his Bachelor of Arts in Russian language and literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his Master of Arts in history from Ohio State. He is a currently a PhD candidate specializing in Central Asian history. His research focuses on the environmental history of Central Asia during the ninth through eleventh centuries, combining different types of historical evidence from primary sources, archaeology, paleoclimatology, and archaeobotany, with preliminary research published in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. His faculty advisor is Scott Levi, a leading specialist in premodern Central Asian history.
The DDRA grant supports doctoral candidates to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad in modern foreign languages and area studies across the world. Nationwide across all disciplines approximately 90 Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowships were awarded this year.
The Office of International Affairs administers the Fulbright-Hays program for Ohio State, and grant competitions are held annually. Doctoral candidates interested in applying for the award must contact Fulbright-Hays program director, Joanna Kukielka-Blaser.