Jim Meyer's Borderlands: Turkey Week coming to Montana State

Turkey Week coming to Montana State

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Guess what, everybody--Turkey week is coming to Bozeman!

Yes, it's true: for one glorious week, this university will be spangled and bedangled with all things Turkish.

In previous years MSU's Office of International Programs would devote a week every Fall semester to the principle of international study more generally. Starting a couple of years ago, however, the OIP decided instead to focus upon just one country each year.

And this year, that country is Turkey!

So all sorts of exciting things are taking place. As you can tell from the list of events below, there will be plenty of food, frolicking, fanfare, and fun for everybody. There will also be several speakers, including Stephen Kinzer and myself.

The choice to focus on Turkey is in some ways a natural for MSU. In recent years, the school has done a lot to promote exchange programs with Turkish universities. This year, there are approximately 40 Turkish undergrads studying here as part of joint-degree programs between MSU, Istanbul Technical University, and Selcuk University in Konya.

All in all, it should be a pretty good show. Almost all of the events are free and open to the public, so anyone in the neighborhood is encouraged to stop by.

All Week
Display of Turkish Artifacts - MSU Library

Mon, Nov 15

Noon - 1 pm

1 - 2 pm

7 pm

"Tulips, Turbans and Arabesques" - Yvonne Seng,

      Holter Museum - MSU SUB 233

Workshop: Making Marbleized Paper - Sondra Hines,

      Holter Museum (materials provided) - MSU SUB 233

STEPHEN KINZER - New York Times Journalist & Best-Selling Author

   "The Rise of Turkey: Is the World Ready for Islamic Democracy?" -

      MSU EPS 103 (Building east of SUB free parking)

Tue, Nov 16

Noon

"Spotlight on Turkey's Rise of Women in Engineering -

      What Can We Learn?" - Dr. Laura Stanley, MSU Engineering Professor -

     MSU SUB 233

Wed, Nov 17

11:30 - 1 pm

Noon

7 pm

Turkish Lunch - Kebabs, Rice Pilaf & Eggplant ($6.95) - MSU SUB Union Market

  "Turkey in a Time of Transition" - Dr. James Meyer, MSU History

     Professor - MSU SUB 233

Turkish Film: "VEDA"2010 Drama, A film based on the life of Atatrurk,

      founder of modern Turkey - Procrastinator Theater, MSU SUB / synopsis - trailer

Thur, Nov 18

7 pm

Turkish Students Cultural Evening - Traditional Turkish Dancing, Music,

      Photos, Textiles, Pottery - Leigh Lounge, MSU SUB

Fri, Nov 19

10 am

Noon

Children's Hour: "Aysegul" - Reading of a traditional Turkish children's story

      by MSU Turkish Students - Bozeman Public Library

"Scholarships for Studying in Turkey" - Zeynep Guven, Turkish Coalition

      of America - MSU SUB 168

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My books in podcasts and other media

Discussion about Red Star over the Black Sea on Turkey Book Talk podcast with William Armstrong.

Red Star over the Black Sea on the New Books Network podcast with Reuben Silverman.

Panel discussion about Red Star over the Black Sea with the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Online lecture on Red Star over the Black Sea for the Anglo-Turkish Society.

Discussion of Red Star over the Black Sea at the Belgrade (Montana) Community Library.

Red Star over the Black Sea featured in Flamman (in Swedish)

Red Star over the Black Sea on Andruck - Deutschlandfunk (in German).

Turks Across Empires on the Ottoman History Podcast.

Interview with one of my students at MSU about Turks Across Empires on the History Roundtable

Brief discussion of Turks Across Empires (in Turkish) on NTV Radio, April 2021.

Review Excerpts for Turks Across Empires

"path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities of Russia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Le projet est particulièrement ambitieux et l’ouvrage est très riche, reposant sur des sources en plusieurs langues...Meyer offre une contribution très importante à l’étude des conflits, des tensions et des dissensions au sein même du monde musulman de l’Empire russe, dans la région de la Volga, entre le clergé institutionnalisé des Assemblées spirituelles et de nouvelles élites intellectuelles ou marchandes qui tentent de s’octroyer, au gré des soubresauts de la vie politique, un espace grandissant de liberté."--Bulletin des Annales Islamologiques

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review

Turkey Week coming to Montana State

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