Jim Meyer's Borderlands: 2024

Assad's Fall and Russia's Stumble

Thursday, December 12, 2024

I can only imagine how eerie it must have been for the residents of Damascus to wake up this past week and find themselves finally rid of the Assads.

All smiles for now

But it must be terrifying as well, at least for those who don't savor the idea of living under the rule of fighters who, until quite recently, were affiliated with ISIS and other extremist Sunni Muslim militias. So, while I doubt that there are very many Syrians who will miss the tyranny of Assad's rule, there are some who will definitely be sorry to see the secularism of Baath party rule come to an end.

Now that Assad has been overthrown, the jockeying for power begins.

Kristmas Konvoy N & P: News from Belgrade and in the World

Sunday, December 8, 2024

It's been a settimana intensa, as I reported to my Italian teacher the other day. This past Thursday was our last day of classes at MSU, so there's been a lot going on. In the city of Belgrade, meanwhile, the Christmas Convoy rumbled through town last night.

The rumbling was so loud that I've barely been able to focus on the news. Russia, Romania, South Korea, Georgia--so much stuff going on. For my takes on the latest at home and abroad, see below.

Postcards from Belgrade: the Snows of Autumn

Sunday, November 24, 2024

The snows of autumn are back.

Not so long ago, the evenings were still quite balmy

I woke up this morning, wrapped myself up as always in my Mongolian robe, and headed out into the living room area. There room has a number of high windows so it gives me a good sense of what the weather is like on any particular day. I saw a bunch of snow falling and all of a sudden felt really energized.

It's nice to have some real snow again.

Shotz from Ireland

Saturday, August 10, 2024

This past May I finished my last class on a Thursday afternoon, then went to my department's end-of-year party. The next morning I got up at 3:30 am, showered, and left my place at about 4:30. As usual, I walked to the airport--it's about fifteen minutes door-to-door--and then flew out to Michigan to see my parents.

I spent a weekend in Ann Arbor before traveling out to Philadelphia for a week to do some research for a new project that I'm working on. The research in Philly could only be conducted in the first week of the month, while some other research I had planned in DC could only take place in the last week of May.

So, I had two weeks on my hands and decided to spend it traveling. From Philly I went up to NYC for a weekend, and from there flew to Ireland, where I stayed for twelve days.

It was a short trip, but a memorable one.

Video of my (virtual) talk on Nâzım Hikmet at Bosphorus University

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Here is a video of a talk I gave (virtually) earlier this year at Bosphorus University's Nâzım Hikmet Kültür ve Sanat Araştırma Merkezi.

The talk is in English.

Thanks to everyone at the center for making this possible.

The Sordid Reflections of a Detroit Lions Fan

Saturday, January 27, 2024

As the only Lions fan in the lives of a number of people, I've been hearing from a lot of friends this week. Mostly, they're writing to tell me that they're pulling for my team in the playoffs, which I appreciate. There's always room for one more on the bandwagon.

I have to say that I'm experiencing something of a personality crisis right now. All my football-watching life, more or less, I've been cheering for a perennial NFL loser. It's definitely strange to see the team doing so well. Part of me is genuinely optimistic and excited, but another side of me just hopes they don't manage to disgrace themselves somehow.

Upcoming Online Talk for the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Nâzım Hikmet Merkezi

Thursday, January 11, 2024

In case you're interested, I'll be giving an online talk about Nâzım Hikmet and my book Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation at an event organized by the Nâzım Hikmet Center at Bosphorus University.

The event takes place on January 15, which is the 122nd anniversary of what is typically considered Nâzım Hikmet's birthday (in fact, it seems he was born toward the end of 1901). Online admission is free and the talk begins at 8 am, Montana time (10 am Eastern US, and 6 pm in Turkey).

For more information, see below.

Gabor Szabo in Budapest

Monday, January 8, 2024

I was in Budapest recently, where I was constantly reminded of one of my favorite jazz musicians, Gabor Szabo.

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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. Altogether, I've spent almost ten years of my life in Turkey, and about four years in the former USSR.

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 full professor since July, 2024. 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