Public Lecture: Can Oil Liberate Women?

Can Oil Liberate Women? Gender, Resource Wealth and the Paradox of Modernisation 

What happens when sudden resource wealth transforms a society faster than its social and political institutions can adapt? This talk explores this question through the relationship between oil, modernisation, and women’s emancipation, beginning with the extraordinary oil boom of late nineteenth-century in Baku. The oil boom created enormous fortunes and deep inequalities, but it also provided resources for new schools, newspapers, charitable initiatives, and cultural institutions. Some of these developments opened previously limited spaces for Muslim women, particularly in education and public life. Yet the relationship between resource wealth and women’s emancipation was never straightforward. Moving from imperial Baku to the twentieth century and the contemporary energy-rich states of the Caspian region, the talk asks why oil wealth can contribute to social transformation in one historical setting while reinforcing authoritarian and patriarchal structures in another. Rather than treating oil as inherently liberating or restrictive, this lecture considers the ideas, institutions, and political choices that shape its social consequences.

About the Guest Speaker 

Dr. Turkay Gasimova is a historian and Lecturer at Miyazaki International University in Japan. She holds a PhD in Intellectual History from the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on the intellectual and political history of the Caucasus and the wider Middle East, with particular interests in Muslim intellectuals, democracy, gender, empire, and the relationship between natural resources and political development. She was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at California State University, Fullerton, where she spent an academic year conducting research in American Studies. Gasimova has also held research and teaching positions at the University of Padova, Central European University, ELTE Budapest, the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, and Baku State University.

Time and date: Thursday, 10 September 2026, 5.30-7pm

Venue: CAIS lecture theatre 

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82910731008?pwd=HvUM2T9EJzEbB5eweZwapki34iXFij.1