Event

Many life stories of actors and narratives who lived during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic have been silenced by the official historiography of the state, institutionalised in Nutuk (The Speech) by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Nutuk has been the only master narrative of the formation of the Turkish national movement and the Republic. It still holds so much power in shaping our understanding and blocking our critical engagement with the foundation of the Republic as well as alternative/critical voices and narratives. Uncovering these implicated subjects provides a much richer context of history than the nationally monochromatic one promoted by the Turkish state and society. This lecture probes how multiple histories of the period open new avenues of a truly integrated, and critical historical synthesis of the early years of the Turkish Republic. It tackles the questions of rupture and continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic through the lens of biographies and alternative histories. It suggests a new way of reading the history of “foundation of the Republic.”

Ümit Kurt is a historian of the modern Middle East. His research is on the social, cultural, and economic history of late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic in the 19th and 20th centuries. He completed his dissertation in the Department of History at Clark University in 2016. He held several postdoctoral positions at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and the Polonsky Academy in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Armenian Studies Program at California State University (CSU) Fresno. Currently, He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Ind. and Social Sciences (History) and an affilate with the Center for Study of Violence in the University of Newcastle, Australia. His recent book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province, has been the recipient of the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies, Honorable Mention Book Prize by Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA), and PROSE Award Finalist in the World History category, the Association of American Publishers in 2022. He is also the author of Antep 1915: Genocide and Perpetrators (İletişim, 2018) and the co-author of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn, 2015). He is now writing a book on the global patterns of mass violence in the Ottoman borderland 1860s-1920s, exploring transformative impact of violence on the nation and state making process in the late and post-Ottoman world.