Halil Berktay | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Turkish |
Alma mater | Yale University Birmingham University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Turkish history |
Institutions | Ibn Haldun University Sabancı University Ankara University Middle East Technical University Harvard University |
Halil Berktay (born August 27, 1947) is a Turkish historian [1] [2] at Ibn Haldun University, who has worked as a columnist for the daily Turkish newspaper Taraf [3] and is one of the first Turkish historians to acknowledge the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.
Berktay was born in İzmir into an intellectual Turkish communist family. Both of his parents were Cretan Turks. His father, Erdoğan Berktay, was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey. As a result of this influence, Halil Berktay remained a Maoist for two decades before he became "an independent left-intellectual". [4]
After graduating from Robert College in 1964, Berktay studied economics at Yale University receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and Master of Arts in 1969. [5] He went on to earn a PhD from Birmingham University in 1990. [5] He worked as lecturer at Ankara University from 1969 to 1971 and from 1978 to 1983. [5] He took part in the founding of the Yale chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society. [4]
Between 1992 and 1997, he taught at both the Middle East Technical University and Boğaziçi University. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1997, and taught at Sabancı University before returning to Harvard in 2006. He is currently a professor at Ibn Haldun University where he is also the head of the History Department. [6]
Berktay's research areas are the history and historiography of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He studies social and economic history (including that of Europe, especially medieval history) from a comparative perspective. He has also written on the construction of Turkish national memory. [5]
After Taner Akçam, Berktay was one of the first Turkish historians to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. [7] [8] In September 2005, Berktay and fellow historians, including Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem, Selim Deringil, convened at an academic conference to discuss the fall of the Ottoman Empire. [9] [10]