Turks Across Empires

with James Meyer

hosted by Nir Shafir and Ella Fratantuono

Pan-Turkism rose to prominence as a political ideology during the early twentieth century, heavily influenced by Muslim intellectuals that traveled between the Russian and Ottoman spheres. For many of these figures such as Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinski, and Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Pan-Turkism became the political movement that defined their legacies. However, as James Meyer explains in his new monograph entitled Turks Across Empires, these intellectuals engaged with numerous other issues of the period well before becoming the Pan-Turkists they are remembered as today. In this episode, Nir Shafir and Ella Fratantuono talk to James Meyer about this research and explore what the history of the Pan-Turkists tells us about the broader sociopolitical connections between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

	James H. Meyer is an assistant professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University. He works on a range of topics relating to Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, and the Muslim communities of Russia. (see academia.edu)
	Nir Shafir is a doctoral candidate at UCLA focusing on the history of knowledge and science in the early modern Middle East. He also runs the website HAZİNE, which profiles different archives, libraries, and museums that house sources on the Islamic world. (see academia.edu)
	Ella Fratantuono is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University studying the social history of migration during the late Ottoman period (see academia.edu)

Episode No. 185
Release date: 14 February 2015
Recording location: Istanbul
Editing and production by Chris Gratien

PUBLICATIONS OF JAMES H. MEYER

Turks Across Empires (Oxford U. Press, 2014)

Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands (Oxford University Press, 2014).

"Speaking Sharia to the State: Muslim Protesters, Tsarist officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14,3 (Summer 2013), 485-505.

“The Economics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Money, Power, and Muslim Communities in Late Imperial Russia.” Book chapter appearing in Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts (Routledge, 2011).

“Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 39:1, February 2007, 15-32.