• "Contextualising Sources and Methods in a Transnational Approach" Humbold-University Berlin, wintersemester 2015/2016

“Thinking about the Ottoman Empire in the Early Republic of Turkey”

This PhD project examines the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey from the point of view of a history of historiography. The main focus is on analyzing historiographical texts that were produced partly still in Ottoman, partly already in Republican times, and that explicitly treat the late Ottoman Empire as a historiographical topic.

The aim of the thesis is to identify breaks and continuities, and to integrate them into a broader context of Intellectual History. The following research questions form the core of the project: What values or being transported in the historiographical texts? What imagined structures of society are implied? How do loyalties change during the transformation period? And in what ways does historical research contribute to the building of a national identity in the early Republic of Turkey?

These questions are being discussed with regard to the writings of three historians: İbnülemin Mahmud Kemal İnal, Osman Nuri Ergin, and İsmail Hami Danişmend. All of them have been active and productive both in late Ottoman and in early Republican times. By writing about the late Ottoman Empire, they are clearly located outside the historiographical mainstream discourse of the newly founded Republic. Still, none of them is being perceived as oppositional or reactionary.

The PhD project places special emphasis on the history of terms and concepts, especially regarding the impact of the Turkish script and language reform.

First Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hannes Grandits

Second Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Nora Lafi

On 29 June 2016, Veronika Hager received the Dr Walther Liebehenz Award for outstanding achievements in the fields of Turkic and Central Asian Studies for her master's thesis titled "Fatma Aliye und Cihan Aktaş: Zwei Selbstentwürfe der modernen muslimischen Frau in Öffentlichkeit und Fiktionalität."

Publications:

Hager, Veronika (2017): A Past, So Distant, and Yet So Very Near. Belleten and the Creation of a Historiographical Rupture. In European Journal of Turkish Studies (24). Available online at http://ejts.revues.org/5506.

Lectures:

• "Coming to Terms with the Recent Past: The Late Ottoman Empire and the First World War in Early Republican Turkish Historiography", Conference "The Long End of the First World War: Ruptures, Continuities and Memories", 7-10 Mai 2017.

• "The World War's Whirlwinds of Blood, Fire, and Passion: Historiographical Representations of the First World War under High Kemalism".
  Turkologentag 2016, Universität Hamburg, 14 - 17 September 2016.
• "Turks, Not Ottomans: Belleten, the Emergence of a Turkish National State Historiography, and the Creation of a Historiographical Rupture"
  Workshop "Toward a Transnational History of Turkish Studies (18th-20th Centuries)", Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes, Istanbul, February 2016.