Embattled Dreamlands: The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory (Routledge, 2020) explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan.
Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of th ... Show More
Yesterday
Murat C. Yildiz, "The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul" (U Texas Press, 2026)
The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire. In The Ottoman World of ... Show More
1h 5m
Yesterday
Mikhail Pelevin, "Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times" (Brill, 2025)
In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025). Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto literary and educat ... Show More
33m 29s
Jul 29
Lisa Blaydes and Samuel Helfont eds., "Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities" (Stanford UP, 2026)
The opening of Iraq's Ba'th Party archives revolutionized the study of Iraqi politics and history, offering scholars unprecedented access to the inner workings of one of the world's most impenetrable autocracies. Ba‘thist Iraq Through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Oppo ... Show More
41m 40s
Sep 2023
Spyros Sofos on Turkey’s many nationalisms
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Spyros Sofos on “Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism” (Edinburgh University Press). The book delves into the ambiguities behind the term “the people” from the late Ottoman era to today, and how religious, secularist, left ... Show More
26m 28s
Feb 2024
Bedross Der Matossian, "The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Bedross Der Matossian's The Armenian Social Democrat Hnchakian Party: Politics, Ideology and Transnational History (Bloomsbury, 2023), based on new research, sheds light on the history of the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party, a major Armenian revolutionary party that operated in t ... Show More
1 h
Jun 2019
Jennifer Dixon, "Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018)
Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official ... Show More
1h 2m
Apr 2025
Craig Larkin: The Politics of Memory, From Mosul to Beirut to Gaza
This week on Babel, Jon Alterman speaks with Dr. Craig Larkin, director of the Center for the Study of Divided Societies at King’s College London. Dr. Larkin is also a research lead on Memory and Conflict for XCEPT, a research consortium studying cross-border conflict. There, he ... Show More
40m 51s