Melanie S. Tanielian

Melanie S. Tanielian is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Director of the Program for International and Comparative Studies. She is a historian of war and society whose work focuses on the emergence of modern humanitarianism. Her first monograph, The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East, examines how the Ottoman home front confronted total war and mass starvation. Tanielian’s research explores how humanitarian practices take shape in moments of crisis, with particular attention to religious philanthropy, imperial and transnational networks, and the moral languages through which suffering was understood and addressed. Her second monograph, Scandals and Salvation: German Humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1896–1933 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), investigates how German Protestant humanitarians navigated moral controversy, religious commitment and geopolitical marginality, revealing scandal as both a crisis and a constitutive method in the development of modern humanitarianism. She has published int the American Historical Review, the Journal for Genocide Research, as well Humanity Journal among others. She is the co-editor of In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis: Activism and the Struggle for Academic Freedom (Disobedience Press, 2026). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.