Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey

Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba

University of Washington Press

1997

Acknowledgements

 

Earlier versions of the essays collected in this book were presented at a conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. In addition to the authors represented in this volume, Aydan Balamir, Murat Belge, Sibel Erol, Zeynep Kezer, and Ilhan Tekeli also presented papers, and we wish to acknowledge their contribution to this project. We also wish to express our gratitude to Philip Khoury, Feroz Ahmad, Beyhan Karahan, Nasser Rabbat, and Royston Landau, whose comments greatly improved the quality and the interdisciplinary appeal of this event. The conference was made possible by a generous grant from the Aga Khan Program at MIT and Harvard, with additional support from the Department of Architecture at MIT and the Turkish Tourism Office in New York. We would like to thank Stanford Anderson, chair of the Department of Architecture at MIT, and Barbro Ek, former director of the Aga Khan Program, for their support of this event. We also thank Renee Caso, Denise Heinze and the rest of the staff at the Aga Khan Program office, Aysen Savas, Hande Bozdogan, Felicia Hecker, and Nicole Watts, who helped us at various stages of this project. Finally, we are grateful to the Institute of Turkish Studies for their grant that supported the publication of this book.

Unfortunately, these acknowledgments must end on a sad note. As we were getting the essays in this volume ready for publication, we received the news of Ernest Gellner’s death. Professor Gellner had carefully revised his own presentation and prepared it for publication well within the deadline we had set for our contributors. We feel privileged to have had the opportunity to host him at our conference, to have benefited from his insightful comments and criticisms, and to have been the editors of a volume that includes one of his last writings.