Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (University of California Press, 2022) is a vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey in which Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development.
After World War II, a cohort of influential Turkish modernists built a new art ... Show More
Yesterday
Martin Shaw, "The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza" (Agenda Publishing, 2025)
The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges Aft ... Show More
1h 17m
Jul 21
Suzy Hansen, "From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan" (FSG, 2026)
From Suzy Hansen, whose previous book, Notes on a Foreign Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026) is a story for a world out of joint. An absorbing account of one ... Show More
48m 51s
Jul 15
Massoud Amin, "Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power" (Wisdom Editions, 2026)
In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power (Wisdom Editions, 2026), Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught beneath it. Writing from a dual vantage as an Iranian-born American trained to see ... Show More
1h 12m
Feb 2021
Turkey: Adnan Menderes, populism, and history
Turkey and 50s Prime Minister Menderes, Erdogan today, and how history is used for political power. Matthew Sweet is joined by Jeremy Seal, Ece Temelkuran, Michael Talbot & Nilay Ozlu.Before his execution in 1961, the Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes saw Turkey admitted to N ... Show More
45m 4s
Sep 2014
The War That Changed The World: Istanbul - Modernity and Secularism
Turkey emerged from the First World War as a new republic, with a secular and modern identity, attempting to break from its Ottoman past. How has this influenced Turkey today? With historians Aksin Somel and Ahmet Kuyas, and novelist Elif Shafak.
50m 2s
Jun 2021
Christine Philliou on reimagining Turkish history and the roots of political dissent
Christine Philliou, associate professor of history at UC Berkeley, on “Turkey: A Past Against History” (University of California Press). The book examines the life of the writer Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965), interrogating the shifting meaning of political dissent from Ottoman to ... Show More
42m 15s
Aug 2022
Saniye Dedeoğlu on Syrian migrants, work and precarity in Turkey
<p>Saniye Dedeoglu on “Syrian Refugees and Agriculture in Turkey Work, Precarity, Survival” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury). The book looks at Syrians' integration into Turkey’s labour market, its effect on relations between men and women, and the role of child labour in the agriculture s ... Show More
31m 46s
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