Episode 413 with Nathalie Clayer, Fabio Giomi, and Emmanuel Szurek hosted by Andreas Guidi Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how Kemalism as a political category has been used widely and often ambiguously throughout the history of the Turkish Republic in public discourse as well as in historiography. In this episode, we discuss Kemalism from an innovative transnational perspective. The making of Ke...
Jun 09, 2019
Episode 411 Produced and Narrated by Chris Gratien Episode Consultant: Devin Naar Series Consultant: Emily Pope-Obeda Script Editor: Sam Dolbee with additional contributions by Devi Mays , Claudrena Harold , Victoria Saker Woeste , Sam Negri , and Louis Negri Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Leo lived in New York City with his family. Born and educated in the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he was now part of the vibrant and richly-textured social fabric of ...
May 02, 2019
Episode 398 with Şevket Pamuk hosted by Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What forces have governed Turkey's economic growth over the past two centuries? In this episode we speak with Şevket Pamuk about development in Turkey since 1820. In the late Ottoman period, low barriers to trade, agrarian exports, and European financial control defined the limits of economic expansion, while the transition from Empire to Republic brought more inward-looking pol...
Jan 17, 2019
Episode 387 with Nefin Dinç hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Antoine Köpe was never a prominent politician or public figure, but he was witness to extraordinary events. Born in late Ottoman Istanbul to French and Hungarian parents, Antoine was there to celebrate the 1908 Young Turk revolution, fight in the First World War, live under an Allied occupation, and experience the emergence of the national resistance and the establishment of the Repub...
Oct 20, 2018
Episode 386 with Suzy Hansen hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Turkey is a country that most Americans know little about, and yet the United States has played an extraordinary role in the making of modern Turkey. In this podcast, we explore this disparity of awareness and the role of the US in the history of the Middle East through the lens of an American journalist's slow realization of her own subjectivity and the myriad ways in which the US a...
Oct 15, 2018
Bölüm 376 Rita Ender Sunucular: Işın Taylan ve Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Mesleğiniz tarih sayfalarından silinirse ne hissedersiniz? İstanbul'da yüzlerce meslek artık yok ve yok olmaya devam ediyor. Bu bölümde, Rita Ender ile Kolay Gelsin kitabı üzerine konuşuyoruz. Kolay Gelsin Agos Gazetesi’nde 2012 - 2014 yılları arasında Meslekler ve Mekanlar adıyla yayınlanmış söyleşilerden oluşuyor ve her bir söyleşi İstanbul tarihine, esnaflığa, değişen ...
Sep 09, 2018
Episode 358 with Hikmet Kocamaner hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Discourses surrounding the family and morality have played an important role in modern political debates. In this episode, we discuss the politics of family in Turkey and its relationship to both religion and government policy. Our guest Hikmet Kocamaner discusses how the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs--the Diyanet--oversees a range of activities concerning the family ...
Apr 17, 2018
Episode 342 with Selcen Coşkun Lorans Tanatar Baruh and Seda Kula Say hosted by Nilay Özlü , Susanna Ferguson and Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, we discuss the history of Beyoğlu's Emek Cinema from its construction in 1884 to its 2013 destruction, which sparked major opposition among Turkish intellectuals, writers, researchers, members of the film industry, and lovers of cinema and of Beyoğlu, many of whom fought to keep this piece...
Jan 23, 2018
Episode 341 with Sara Rahnama hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Seçil Yilmaz Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, we explore debates about aesthetics, headwear, and dress in interwar Algeria and Turkey. Why did hats and hijabs generate so much debate among Algerian thinkers, both men and women? How did expectations about what men would wear on their heads carry different political connotations than similar debates about women's head coverings? This episode t...
Jan 17, 2018
Episode 337 with Kalliopi Amygdalou hosted by Michael Talbot Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the late Ottoman period, the diverse and vibrant Aegean ports of Izmir (Smyrna) and Thessaloniki (Salonica) experienced rapid growth and transformation through the increased interconnection of the Mediterranean world and the rise of maritime trade. But in the tumultuous final decade of the Ottoman period, both cities witnessed political and demographic upheaval as well...
Nov 23, 2017
Episode 321 with Peter McMurray hosted by Nir Shafir and Huma Gupta Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What is the aural possibility of Islamic life in European cities today? This special episode begins with a ten-minute segment from an audio composition crafted by our guest, musicologist Peter McMurray, from recent field recordings and ethnographies he conducted among various Turkish communities in Berlin. As the discussion progresses we weave in and out of two discuss...
Jun 26, 2017
Episode 299 with Angela Andersen hosted by Chris Gratien and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, we approach the religious architecture of the Alevis, to examine how practice shapes architectural space and how socioeconomic change transforms such spaces. Many of our episodes on Ottoman History Podcast have focused on how monumental architecture, such as mosques and other buildings of religious significance, are tied to political transformat...
Feb 14, 2017
Episode 293 with Daniel-Joseph Macarthur-Seal hosted by Nir Shafir featuring additional material by Samuel Dolbee Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The Opium Wars and the massive trade in opium between South Asia and China over the nineteenth century attest to the prominent role of opium within the history of colonialism and globalization. But it is less well known that in the early twentieth century, the Republic of Turkey became the largest exporter of opium in the w...
Jan 15, 2017
Episode 290 with Emmanuel Szurek hosted by Chris Gratien and Aurélie Perrier featuring Seçil Yılmaz and Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud National language politics and the transformation of literacy have effected major changes in both spoken and written language over the course of the last century, but few languages have changed as dramatically as modern Turkish. The reform of the language from the 1920s onward, which not only replaced the Ottoman alphabet ...
Jan 05, 2017
with Lerna Ekmekçioğlu hosted by Chris Gratien , Nir Shafir , and Eda Çakmakçı Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud After facing the destruction of their community during the First World War, former Ottoman Armenians set about rebuilding in Turkey first during a period of relative optimism under the Allied occupation of Istanbul and later as non-Muslim citizens of new Turkish nation-state. In her new work entitled Recovering Armenia , Lerna Ekmekçioğlu explores the change...
Aug 07, 2016
with Kishwar Rizvi hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud As spaces fundamental to Muslim religious and communal life, mosques have historically served as sites of not just architectural but also ideological construction. As our guest Kishwar Rizvi argues in her latest book entitled The Transnational Mosque (UNC Press 2015) , states operating in transnational contexts have taken a leading role in the building of mosques and in doing so, they forge po...
Jul 01, 2016
with Sarah-Neel Smith hosted by Nicholas Danforth Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud Although artistic production occurs in a political context, art and politics are often studied as separate fields of historical inquiry. Our guest in this episode, Dr. Sarah-Neel Smith, offers a reflection on the close relationship between art and politics in Turkey through a discussion of her research on the figure of Bülent Ecevit. As a politician, Ecevit is remembered for his four stints as Prime...
Apr 30, 2016
with Sylvia Wing Önder hosted by Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud The subject of health in the modern period is often discussed as a transition from traditional to scientific medicine and what Foucault has called "the birth of the clinic." Such perspectives view medicine and healing through the lens of changing methods, forms of knowledge, and types of authority. In this podcast, our guest Sylvia Wing Önder offers a slightly different approac...
Nov 16, 2015
with Nazan Maksudyan hosted by Susanna Ferguson Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud In the 1920s and 1930s, politicians, intellectuals, and members of the public joined a lively debate about the issue of female suicide in Turkey. While we cannot know whether the rates of female suicide were actually skyrocketing during this period, the fact that so many public figures began to treat this issue as a central concern tells us a lot about the relationship between the modernizing ...
Oct 26, 2015
with Aslı Iğsız hosted by Chris Gratien and Nicholas Danforth Countries, much like companies, must seek to present a certain image to the outside world in order to achieve political and economic goals. As our guest, Aslı Iğsız, demonstrates, this self-presentation can take the form of full-fledged marketing campaigns. In this episode, we explore the marketing policies and strategies adopted in Turkey and the broader Middle East during the past two decades and reflect on how they various match, c...
Apr 02, 2015
with Ozan Aksoy hosted by Chris Gratien and Ceren Erdem The songs and melodies of the Turkey's Alevi communities derive from a long history of song-making in Anatolia that is embedded in local geographies and indelibly tied to notions of worship and belonging. So what happens when, through migration and media, that music enters entirely new contexts? In this episode, we sit down with ethnomusicologist and musician Ozan Aksoy to discuss his research on Kurdish Alevi music in diasporic contexts an...
Mar 18, 2015
Istanbul is full of landmarks and objects dating to the Ottoman period that give us a glimpse of the city's material culture. However, the scents and sounds that made up the urban experience of Ottoman Istanbul often elude us. In our inaugural episode of Season 4, we explore the sounds of Istanbul today and link them to city of the Ottoman past. « Click for More »
May 03, 2014
with Nicholas Danforth hosted by Chris Gratien When are policies driven by prejudice, and when do policies give rise to prejudiced representations? In this episode, Nicholas Danforth explores depictions of Middle East politics in the Turkish satirical periodical Akbaba from the 1930s onward in an attempt to understand the politics of representation, and offers some comparisons regarding the role of such prejudices and discourses within contemporary politics in the US and elsewhere. « Click for M...
Dec 26, 2013
with Nicholas Kontovas hosted by Chris Gratien and Lydia Harrington This episode is part of a series on Women, Gender, and Sex in Ottoman history Download the series Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud The term Lubunca refers to a type of slang historically used among Istanbul’s LGBTQ communities. The term has gained currency only in the past decades, but in this podcast, Nicholas Kontovas suggest much deeper orgins in an overview of this underground jargon and its connections to the historical s...
Dec 18, 2013
133. New Friends or Old Foes? The Russo-Ottoman rivalry was one of the defining dramas of the European political stage for centuries. When both of these empires gave way to new states following the First World War, a new period of Soviet-Turkish relations began. In this episode, Onur İşçi follows ups and downs of this relationship over the past century through a discussion of the interplay between domestic and foreign politics in Turkey. « Click for More »...
Dec 07, 2013
with Alev Kuruoğlu hosted by Chris Gratien The situation of Kurdish language and culture in Turkey is one that has been very much in flux within an ever-changing political climate. The Kurdish music industry has become increasingly lively in recent years under more favorable legal conditions, though even still, many feel that the scene remains underground. Because of its tenuous legal status, the production of Kurdish music irrespective of lyrical content has also historically carried an inheren...
Aug 02, 2013
with Seçil Yılmaz hosted by Chris Gratien and Sam Dolbee During the interwar period, nationalist and socialist movements throughout the world looked to the peasant as both the source and object of state programs wherein establishing a link between the center and the provinces was a critical part of fostering the sense of nation devised by elite intellectuals. In Turkey, the ideas of Ziya Gökalp regarding the importance of the Anatolian villager in the development of Turkish national culture are ...
Jul 19, 2013
with Yasemin Gencer hosted by Chris Gratien and Emily Neumeier Following the World War I period, the founders of a new Turkish Republic sought to define and legitimize the new order as a break with the Ottoman past. In this episode, Yasemin Gencer explains the ways in which notions such as childhood were used to construct the image of a renewed Turkish society in the nationalist press during the early years of the Republican period. « Click for More »...
Apr 19, 2013
with Nicholas Danforth One of the central questions in the history of modern Turkey continues be the late-Ottoman legacy and in particular, the experience of World War I and the War of Independence (1914-1923). While some authors choose this period as a start or end point for their historical studies, others seek to identify continuities across Ottoman and republican temporal space. In this episode, Nick Danforth describes different approaches to the periodization of modern Turkish history and e...
Apr 19, 2012
with Chris Gratien hosted by Nicholas Danforth For at least two centuries, Western countries have used international criminal, civil, and commercial law as a means of influencing the Ottoman and Turkish governments, leading some to speak of a phenomenon called legal imperialism, and while these efforts have impacted policies in Turkey, they have not always achieved their intended effect. In this episode, Chris Gratien discusses an interesting case of would-be trademark infringement in early Repu...
Dec 26, 2011
