{"id":7402,"date":"2024-10-07T09:53:30","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T06:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/?p=7402"},"modified":"2024-10-08T09:51:50","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T06:51:50","slug":"faculty-qa-interview-with-berke-torunoglu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/?p=7402","title":{"rendered":"FACULTY Q&A: Interview with Berke Toruno\u011flu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Asst. Prof. Berke Toruno\u011flu is a historian who specializes in the social and political history of the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on the history of the Ottoman Empire. He earned his BA in International Relations in 2006 and his MA in History in 2009, both from Bilkent University. He holds a PhD in Modern Middle East History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before joining Bilkent University, Toruno\u011flu was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and later served as a lecturer at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, Toruno\u011flu teaches several courses, including HIST 407\/617, Ottoman Intellectual Life in the Reform Period (1839\u20131914); HIST 442\/702, and A History of the Modern Middle East (1800 to Present).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why did you choose an academic career?<\/strong>
I\u2019m a curious person by nature.
I do it for myself. I\u2019m deeply curious about everything under the sun. I want to have at least a basic understanding of everything.
I could have been a physicist. So, why history? I felt that humankind is the most interesting subject to study. I chose history because I believed it was the most concrete of the social sciences I could pursue.
This is what I initially thought, but then I realized that history is as imagined as psychology and as fluid. So, I ended up in this life, which is a somewhat selfish attempt to satisfy my curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What has been the most exciting moment of your career so far?<\/strong>
A defining moment for me was when, as an undergraduate, I took a seminar with the late Professor Halil \u0130nalc\u0131k. I was in my fourth year and didn\u2019t really know what I was getting into, but we were reading historical documents, and I realized there\u2019s something called a \u201cmeta-text.\u201d It\u2019s not just words on paper\u2014it\u2019s the intentionality, the unspoken messages conveyed through phraseology and the structure of the text. That opened my eyes to the idea that our means of communication, whether through language or written text, is flawed. That realization changed how I view everything, from media to casual conversations. It was a turning point for me and made me want to become a historian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s one piece of information from your field that you think everyone should know?<\/strong>
I\u2019ll go with the first thing that pops into my mind, related to the course I\u2019m offering right now. It\u2019s about the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). There are two distinct CUPs. When we refer to \u0130ttihat\u00e7\u0131lar, we often mean the military wing in Salonica, but we should also recognize the intellectuals in Europe. These two groups were segregated for a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When and where do you do your best thinking?<\/strong>
Usually, in my lojman, surrounded by my cats. I tend to do my best thinking late at night. You know the term \u201ce\u015fref saati\u201d? Well, my e\u015fref saati is probably around 10 p.m. and onwards. It\u2019s not great for my health and well-being, but I\u2019ve made my peace with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What distracts you?<\/strong>
I distract myself. As I mentioned earlier, this is a selfish crusade to satisfy my curiosity. Sometimes, I\u2019ll spend days reading about topics that have nothing to do with my research, like the Spanish painter Goya and his impressions of the Napoleonic armies. I have no intention of researching or publishing about it, but I\u2019ll dive deep into it for days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are you most curious about?<\/strong>
As I\u2019ve I said, I\u2019m curious about everything under the sun\u2014anything humans have done, from architecture to culinary activities. It\u2019s hard to say what I\u2019m most curious about because it changes based on my mood or some serendipitous event. Suddenly, something will catch my attention, and I\u2019ll get invested in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you like to do when you are not working?<\/strong>
I feel like I\u2019ve really neglected my literary reading. I\u2019ve been trying to focus on reading literature to appreciate another aspect of human achievements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you weren\u2019t an academic, what career would you choose?<\/strong>
I was very close to becoming an archaeologist. It\u2019s quite similar to history. Then I realized that I\u2019d have to spend my summers outdoors, under the hot sun, whereas in academia I get to stay indoors with air conditioning and work in front of my computer.
I\u2019m still interested in archaeology, and I can imagine a version of myself as an archaeologist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the secret of leading a happy life?<\/strong>
Good food, good sleep\u2014I\u2019ll give you the \u201cold man\u201d answers.
Happiness, I don\u2019t think, is a constant. It\u2019s a state of mind, something fleeting that we chase. So, I\u2019ll let you know when I find the answer!
I think you can be happy after enjoying a good meal for five minutes. Then you realize you might gain weight, and your happiness fades. So, I think happiness is about increasing those small moments of joy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you could go back to your undergraduate\/graduate student years, what advice would you give to your younger-self?<\/strong>
Learn Russian earlier. Invest in your health\u2014work out. Definitely learn a third language as early as possible and read more literature. Don\u2019t be intimidated by Russian novelists who write 2,000-page books. Finish Tutunamayanlar, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you like the most about being at Bilkent?<\/strong>
Bilkent is my alma mater, so I already had a very high opinion of it. All my role models were Bilkent professors, so I feel like I\u2019m living the dream. That\u2019s one reason.
Another reason is that I\u2019m an Ottoman historian and of all the disciplines in the sciences, this is the one most centered in Turkey. You can\u2019t say that physics, for example, is centered in any one place\u2014it\u2019s global. But for Ottoman history, the archives, the architecture, the documents and the culture are all here in Turkey. So, I feel like I\u2019m exactly where I need to be to do my job well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What projects are you working on currently?<\/strong>
One article I\u2019m working on is about Ottoman-Greek relations during the Crimean War. It\u2019s a rather dry topic about an undeclared war that culminated in the deportation of some Greek nationals and some border skirmishes\u2014events that I realized had not been thoroughly explored in the scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What excites you about your work? What\u2019s the coolest thing about it?<\/strong>
The coolest thing about my work? I\u2019ll give you an anecdote: I think the coolest part is being in physical contact with the historical documents that people read about in books. For example, I can read the actual handwriting of a sultan, complete with his notes in the margins. Sometimes I open an envelope from the Ottoman archives that\u2019s still sealed and occasionally gold dust falls out. The gold dust was used to dry the ink, especially for fancy correspondences. Once when I opened an envelope, gold dust fell onto my lap\u2014probably worth more than my graduate student salary at the time!
I think that\u2019s very cool. If you\u2019re curious about the world you live in, this is one of the coolest things you can do. It\u2019s about understanding what humans have done\u2014history is the record of human achievement. As a human being, there\u2019s nothing cooler than studying what our kind has accomplished in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is your best work, in your opinion?<\/strong>
I tend to cringe when I read my own work, but I think that\u2019s normal. I see it as a good sign. If you think you\u2019ve done your best and it\u2019s the best you\u2019ll ever do, then there\u2019s no room for growth.
I guess I\u2019m proud of the work I put into my dissertation, considering that it involved researching multiple archives\u2014from British to Russian to Ottoman to Greek. I can\u2019t even imagine how I managed the mental and physical effort required for that 10 years ago. I don\u2019t think I could do it now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which books have influenced you the most and why?<\/strong>
That\u2019s a tough question, but I really, really like \u015eerif Mardin\u2019s The Genesis of the Young Ottoman Thought. It\u2019s not the best-written or the most well-researched book, but it came to me at a certain point in my life when I found it fascinating. It led me to learn about the Tanzimat reformers, Islam as a culture and a way of thinking, modernity and westernization.
This work influenced me so much that it was one of the reasons I learned Ottoman Turkish; I wanted to feel as smart as \u015eerif Mardin. He became a role model for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s the most common misconception about your work?<\/strong>
The most common misconception is that history is a \u201cdone deal.\u201d People assume it has already happened so there\u2019s nothing new a historian can do other than repeat what past historians have said. But that\u2019s not the case.
First, people lie\u2014that\u2019s a given. Second, our interpretation of history, our vision and our methodology have changed over time. Today, we use comparative methods, and we\u2019re only beginning to understand how humankind has thought and collected their documents.
Another misconception is that history is one of the oldest disciplines. In reality it only became a formal discipline in the mid-19th century, emerging from philology. The early historians appeared in Europe in the late 19th century. So, it\u2019s a relatively new field.
Something that is a bit self-deprecating is that since history was created as a discipline, it can also be unmade. It\u2019s possible that in a generation or two, history as we know it may not exist. Maybe computer scientists, through data analysis, will be the best historians of the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you had unlimited funds, what would you like to do in research or in projects?<\/strong>
I would invest heavily in digital humanities. Specifically, I\u2019d work to digitize and make all the Ottoman documents searchable and, ideally, even readable, by transliterating them into modern Turkish.
So, with unlimited funds, I\u2019d probably continue doing what I\u2019m doing right now\u2014just with more resources and confidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asst. Prof. Berke Toruno\u011flu is a historian who specializes in the social and political history of the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on the history of the Ottoman Empire. He earned his BA in International Relations in 2006 and his MA in History in 2009, both from Bilkent[Read More…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7404,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[168,83,164],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7402"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7402"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7403,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7402\/revisions\/7403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bilkentnews.bilkent.edu.tr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}