Christopher Dole on psychiatry and disaster in Turkey
August 5, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #250 – Christopher Dole, professor of anthropology at Amherst College, on “Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey” (Stanford University Press).
The book is an account of the psychiatric response to the August 1999 Marmara Earthquake, which killed over 20,000 people and left hundreds of thousands injured or displaced. It also examines the legacy of the earthquake in the communities and lives of its survivors and among the Turkish mental health professionals who responded to it.
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Samuel Hirst on a century of Ankara-Moscow cooperation
December 17, 2024
Turkey Book Talk #234 – Samuel J. Hirst, historian and assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University, on “Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939” (Oxford University Press).
The book examines crucial but sometimes overlooked decades of close cooperation between the young Republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union on key political, industrial and cultural projects. The conversation also discusses later episodes of collaboration between Ankara and Moscow in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the bromance between Erdogan and Putin today.
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Read a transcript of the interview on Substack
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Support Turkey Book Talk as a member on either Substack or Patreon. Members get a 35% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman History books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, access to transcripts of every interview, transcripts of the whole archive, and links to articles related to the subject of every episode.
Turkey Book Talk #216 – Seda Demiralp, professor of political science at Istanbul’s Işık University and non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, on what the recent surprise local election results mean for Turkish politics.
The conversation takes in what the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) did right, what Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) did wrong, the emerging challenge to the AKP posed by the hardline Islamist Yeniden Refah Party, the performance of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, and the impact of Turkey’s economic woes.
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Turkey Book Talk #198 – Şebnem Gümüşcü, associate professor of political science at Middlebury College, on “Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia” (Cambridge University Press).
The book looks in depth at how intra-party factional struggles were key in shaping the AKP’s authoritarian direction in Turkey, while also comparing this with Islamist parties that won elections in Egypt and Tunisia.
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Turkey Book Talk #195 – Political communications strategist Derin Koçer on Turkey’s critical recent presidential and parliamentary elections.
The conversation addresses how economic woes may actually have helped Erdogan’s campaign, why the main opposition CHP repeatedly fails, whether nationalism is the real winner to emerge from the ballot boxes, and what awaits Turkey in the next five years.
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Sevgi Adak on anti-veiling campaigns in Turkey
September 27, 2022
Turkey Book Talk #177 – Sevgi Adak, associate professor at the International Aga Khan University, on “Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic” (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury).
The book examines measures taken by the Turkish authorities against women’s veiling, as well as other forms of clothing, in the 1920s and 1930s. It complicates the rigid idea of sweeping official measures imposed from the centre onto a passive, traditional and resentful Turkish public, giving us a more nuanced and sophisticated account of dynamics between state and society.
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Turkey Book Talk episode 173 – Gönül Bozoğlu, Leverhulme Research Fellow at Newcastle University, on “Museums, Emotion and Memory Culture: The Politics of the Past in Turkey” (Routledge).
The book focuses on the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul and the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara to show how history in Turkey is often a battleground where contemporary identities clash for supremacy.
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Turkey Book Talk episode 169 – Murat Metinsoy, professor of political science and international relations at Istanbul University, on “The Power of the People: Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of Modern Turkey, 1923-38” (Cambridge University Press).
The book takes a bottom-up approach to examine how ordinary people’s reaction to Kemalist reforms shaped, modified or softened how those reforms were implemented on the ground.
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Turkey Book Talk episode 168 – Reuben Silverman on “Borderline Personalities: Lives at the Political, Social and Geographic Edges of Modern Turkey” (Libra Books).
The book brings together pieces from his website largely focusing on figures from the social, political and cultural margins to illustrate broader themes of modern Turkish history.
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Also check out Reuben’s previous appearance on the podcast from May 2019.
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Turkey Book Talk episode 167 – Sarah-Neel Smith, assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art, on “Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey” (University of California Press).
The book paints a vivid portrait of Turkey’s art world in the 1950s and how it reflected early Cold War ideas of national development, individual enterprise and global integration.
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Yonca Köksal on Ottoman modernisation from the ground up
October 12, 2021
Turkey Book Talk episode #152 – Yonca Köksal, associate professor of history at Koç University, on “The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne” (Routledge).
The book compares and contrasts the application of the Ottoman Empire’s modernising, centralising Tanzimat reforms of the 19th century in the Balkan province of Edirne and the central Anatolian province of Ankara.
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Turkey Book Talk episode #138 – Jenny White, professor at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies, on “Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence” (Princeton University Press).
The graphic novel, illustrated by Ergün Gündüz, tells the story of four young protagonists caught up in the social and political turbulence leading to Turkey’s 1980 military coup.
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Here’s a link to the Spotify playlist specially crafted to complement the book, featuring popular songs from the era.
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Support Turkey Book Talk by becoming a member. Members get extras including exclusive access to a 30% discount on all Turkey/Ottoman history books published by IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, English and Turkish transcripts of every interview upon publication, transcripts of the entire archive of episodes, and an archive of 231 reviews covering Turkish and international fiction, history, journalism and politics.
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