Centennial of the 1923 exchange between Muslims in Greece and the Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey coincides with the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. This talk will address the legacies of this exchange in the contemporary world context and revisit the implications of “commemoration” in the “civilizationist” present.
Aslı Iğsız is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research interests include political violence, eugenics, humanism, spatial segregation and forced migration, and cultural policy. Her first book Humanism in Ruins: Entangled Legacies of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange (Stanford University Press) was published in 2018. Humanism in Ruins sought to offer a critique of liberalism from the angle of the management of difference, and explored the underlying racialized logics of population transfers, partitions, segregation, apartheid, and border walls. Currently she is working on a new project on the notion of civilizationism in the contemporary world context. Iğsız was previously a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Sponsored by the Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies, Department of History
Co-sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program
