PRESS RELEASE
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research
395 Concord Avenue
Belmont, MA 02478
Tel.: 617-489-1610
E-mail: [email protected]
DR. Taner Akçam TO GIVE LECTURE AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Turkish scholar Dr. Taner Akçam will give a lecture entitled "A
Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish
Responsibility" on Wednesday, March 14, at 7:30 p.m., at Harvard
University’s Center for Government and International Studies, Auditorium
S010, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA. The lecture will be
co-sponsored by the Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research
and Documentation, the National Association for Armenian Studies and
Research (NAASR), the Harvard Armenian Society, the Mashtots Chair in
Armenian Studies, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
A pioneer among scholars of Turkish origin, Dr. Taner
Akçam is the author of the recently published A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
(Metropolitan Books), a groundbreaking study that makes extensive,
unprecedented use of Ottoman and other sources largely unexamined in
English-language works. Drawing on all the significant evidence – in
Turkish military and court records, parliamentary minutes, eyewitness
narratives, and previous works of scholarship – Akçam has produced a
scrupulous account of Ottoman culpability.
Present-Day Denial Rooted in Ottoman Fears
The Unionists who carried out the Armenian Genocide, the
Nationalists of the early Turkish Republic, and today’s denialists have
all believed they were saving the Turkish fatherland from partition by
the West. Any attempt to open a discussion on this past has been
denounced as a covert move in a master plan to partition the country.
This tangle of past and present into a tight knot of self-defensiveness
has its roots in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. From late Ottoman
times to the present, there has been continuous tension between the
state’s concern for secure borders and society’s need to come to terms
with abuses of human rights.
Nobel Prize winning-author Orhan Pamuk has said, "A Shameful
Act is the definitive account of the organized destruction of the
Ottoman Armenians written by a brave Turkish scholar who has devoted his
life to chronicling the events. No future discussion of the history
will be able to ignore this brilliant book."
Recent Events Give Added Timeliness to Work
The recent murder of Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink in
Istanbul, Turkey’s bid for entry into the European Union, and the
Armenian Genocide recognition bill in the U.S. Congress have given
Akçam’s scholarly work of historical excavation an additional
timeliness as Turkey struggles to confront its history.
Dr. Akçam is also the author of From Empire to Republic:
Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, Dialogue Across An
International Divide: Essays Towards a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue, as
well as numerous other books and articles in Turkish, German, and
English.
Akçam was born in the province of Ardahan, Turkey, in
1953. He became interested in Turkish politics at an early age. As the
editor in chief of a student political journal, he was arrested in 1976
and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Amnesty International adopted
him as one of their first prisoners of conscience, and a year later he
escaped by digging a tunnel with a stove leg and fled to Germany, where
he received political asylum.
In 1988, Akçam began work as a research scientist at the
Hamburg Institute for Social Research. While researching the late
Ottoman Empire and early Republic, especially the history of political
violence and torture in Turkey, he became interested in the Armenian
Genocide. In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of
Hanover with a dissertation entitled "The Turkish National Movement and
the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals
in Istanbul Between 1919 and 1922." Since 2002 he has been a visiting
associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota.
Early Arrival Recommended
A question-and-answer period will follow the lecture. Dr.
Akçam’s book A Shameful Act will be on sale and available for signing.
It is strongly recommended that audience members arrive early as
seating is limited.
More information on Dr. Akçam’s lecture may be obtained
from NAASR by calling 617-489-1610, by fax at 617-484-1759, by e-mail at
[email protected], or by writing to NAASR, 395 Concord Ave., Belmont, MA
02478; or by contacting the Zoryan Institute by phone at 617-497-6713 or
e-mail at [email protected].