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Duke University Faculty

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Erdağ Göknar


Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish & Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He is the award-winning translator of Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red and A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace. His most recent book is Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge 2013). Under the working title Occupied Istanbul, his current research project examines the Allied occupation of Istanbul after World War I. He is academic director of the Duke in Istanbul (Fall/Spring) and Duke in Turkey (Summer) programs and is director of programming for Turkish Studies at Duke.

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Mustafa Tuna


Mustafa Tuna (Ph.D. 2009, Princeton University) is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Russian and Central Eurasian History and Culture in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the Department of History and Duke Islamic Studies Center. His research focuses on social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia, especially Russia’s Volga-Ural region and modern Turkey, since the early-nineteenth century. He is particularly interested in identifying the often intertwined roles of Islam, social networks, state or elite interventions, infrastructural changes, and the globalization of European modernity in transforming Muslim communities. His first book, titled Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788-1917, is under contract with Cambridge University Press to be published in the “Critical Perspectives on Empire Series.” And his second book project investigates the transmission of Islamic knowledge and religiosity comparatively in the Turkish and Soviet cases. Dr. Tuna is married and has two sons.

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Timur Kuran


Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. His research focuses on (1) social change, including the evolution of preferences and institutions, and (2) the economic history and thought of the Middle East. His current projects include a study of the role that the Middle East’s traditional institutions played in its poor political performance, as measured by democratization and human liberties. Among his publications are Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press); Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press); The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press); and a trilingual edited work that consists of ten volumes, Socio-Economic Life in Seventeenth-century Istanbul: Glimpses from Court Records (İş Bank Publications).

Didem Havlioğlu


Didem Havlioğlu is a literary historian, and her research has been focused on the gender construction of the intellectual culture in the Ottoman Empire. Didem is particularly interested in underrepresented groups such as women writers and their ways to both perform and challenge the intellectual language and its space. Her book, Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-bending and Subversion in Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) tells the story of Mihri Hatun, the first woman writer in Ottoman history, in context of the practice of composition, performance, and subversion in the courtly literature of the early modern Ottoman world.