Jim Meyer's Borderlands: November 2020

N & P: Annual Conference Edition

Friday, November 13, 2020

Things have been pretty busy up here at the Borderlands Lodge these past few weeks. I've been writing a lot. The semester is coming to an end, and many other projects are coming due.

One of the scholarly organizations that I'm a part of [ASEEES] held the first half of its annual conference last weekend. It was a nice experience. Way back in January, I had organized a panel called "Communist Internationals: the Lives and Networks of Foreign Communists in the USSR." My talk was called "Grumpy Old Communists: The Ageing Rivalries of Turkish Communist Party Leaders in the Late Cold War East Bloc." The talk related to some of the elderly Turkish communists--especially the enigmatic "Marat"--who were still living in the USSR in the 1970s and 80s, and is based upon material from the epilogue of the book I'm writing on Nâzım Hikmet. Interestingly, there was a great turnout, despite the early hour--perhaps a consequence of the online format? I was also a discussant on another panel about the South Caucasus, which was likewise really fun.

İsmail Bilen (a.k.a. "Marat") and Zeki
Baştımar were both featured in my talk

My first panel started at 6 am, Mountain Time. Since the conference was virtual, we were recommended to meet up fifteen minutes ahead of time to make sure the Zooms would work. Because I live in an apartment building and felt uncomfortable about the prospect of delivering a 15-minute paper in my loud Zoom voice at that early hour, I opted to walk to my office on campus and do the first panel from there.

It was nice to be in my office again.

I'd only been back a couple of times since March, each time very briefly. It was weird to be hanging out there, doing my panel, but also kind of a great experience. It reminded me of some of the things that I miss most these days: going to school and seeing my colleagues and students on campus.

Anyway, the conference was a good experience, and I look forward to attending more of it this weekend--because when a conference is virtual, it turns out that you don't have to put it on four days in a row. All in all, the organization has been really impressive, all things considered.

And in the rest of the world? Well, that's been a bit more hit or miss...

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I am an historian of the Turkic World, with over 30 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA from Princeton and a PhD from Brown, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of associate professor since 2015. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014. A paperback version of Turks Across Empires came out in July, 2019.

I spent the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant. Now I am back at MSU, where I typically teach two classes per semester on topics relating to the Balkans, the Middle East, and former Soviet space. My new book, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation came out in March of 2023.

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