Jan 9

Sean Mathews, "The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East" (Hurst, 2025)

Where does Greece belong? Many look at the ancient Greek ruins of Athens, and see the cradle of Western civilization. But much of Greece’s history actually looks eastward to the rest of the Mediterranean: to Turkey, Egypt, Israel and Palestine. In his book The New Byzantines: The ... Show More

45m 51s

Jan 8

Sheiba Kian Kaufman, "Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama examines the concept of early modern globality and the development of European toleration discourse through English representations of Persian monarchs and Persianate conceptions of hospitality as paradigms of interreligious and int ... Show More

59m 38s

Jan 7

Nile Green, "Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean" (U Texas Press, 2026)

Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea – a small island at the centre of a very big story. For over a thousand years, Muslim pilgrims, merchants, scholars, and soldiers have passed through “Lanka” or “Sarandib”, leaving trac ... Show More

1h 2m

Aug 2023

Anthony Bigio on Gad Franco, Sephardi Turkish patriot in times of turmoil

Anthony Gad Bigio on “A Sephardi Turkish Patriot: Gad Franco in the Turmoil of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic” (Hamilton Books). The book describes the turbulent and difficult life of Gad Franco, a prominent journalist, social activist and lawyer in the late Ottom ... Show More

37m 7s

Dec 2018

The Emergence of Modern Turkey

100 years ago, Turkish defeat in World War One signalled the end of the once great Ottoman Empire. What emerged was a European orientated secular republic led by a man who used social engineering to shape Turkey in his own image – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Bridget Kendall examines t ... Show More

40m 9s

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

Jun 2019

Elif Mahir Metinsoy on Ottoman women during World War I

Elif Mahir Metinsoy on her book “Ottoman Women During World War I: Everyday Experiences, Politics and Conflict” (Cambridge University Press). The book describes the lives of Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire during the Great War, moving beyond a focus on the educated urban popul ... Show More

23m 23s

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

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 2021

79/ Erasures, Borders and the Afterlife of the Armenian Genocide (with Sophia Armen)

This is a conversation with <a href="https://twitter.com/SophiaArmen" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Sophia Armen</a>, an Armenian-American writer, scholar and organizer, about the legacy of the Armenian Genocide today. We spoke about race in the Ottoman Empi ... Show More

1h 48m

Oct 2023

Nilay Özok-Gündoğan on political authority in Ottoman Kurdistan

Nilay Özok-Gündoğan on “The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege” (Edinburgh University Press). The book narrates the rise and fall of the Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman east, as well as how their autonomy was abolished as the empire moderni ... Show More

45m 24s

Jan 2024

İlkim Büke Okyar on Arabs in Turkish popular culture

İlkim Büke Okyar on “Arabs in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1876-1950: National Self and Non-National Other” (Syracuse University Press). The conversation addresses how Arabs are typically viewed in Turkish popular culture, also examining the impact of the influx of Syrian migra ... Show More

32m 53s

Sep 2023

Spyros Sofos on Turkey’s many nationalisms

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

Anthony Gad Bigio, "A Sephardi Turkish P...