Aytek Soner Alpan

Profile

Research Interests

• Modern Turkish History
• Karamanlidika Studies
• Refugee Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Historiography and Theory
• Memory
• Identity
• Gender

Education

• PhD, History, University of California, San Diego (USA)
• MSc, Economics, Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
• BSc, Physics, Middle East Technical University (Turkey)

Biography

Aytek Soner Alpan is a historian. Broadly, his research examines ethnic and linguistic minorities in the framework of the transition from empire to nation-state, forced displacement, and the formation of refugee identity, agency, and memory subsequent to involuntary population movements. His research concentrates primarily on modern Greece and Turkey, particularly on the experience of the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. His book project entitled Trajectories of Displacement: A Comparative Historical Analysis of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange offers a broad and long-term analysis of the Greco-Turkish population exchange with an emphasis on the refugee experience. He also performs research relating to the Constantinopolitan Greek community and Turcophone Orthodox Greek communities in modern Greece and the Ottoman Empire. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, San Diego, and an MSc in Economics from the Middle East Technical University. During his doctoral studies, he received scholarships from the A. S. Onassis Foundation and Foundation for Education and European Culture. His book on the destruction of Tatavla, one of the lower-class Greek quarters of Constantinople, in 1929 as a result of a catastrophic fire and the fire’s instrumentalization in the Turkification of the urban space will be published in December 2023 in Turkish. He has contributed to A Century of Greek-Turkish Relations: A Handbook (Transnational Press) with a chapter assessing the history of the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population Exchange and the long shadow of this landmark event on Greco-Turkish relations. His forthcoming article on the Greco-Turkish rapprochement in the early 1930s and its consequences for the Pontic Greek refugees will be published in the vol. 14 (issue 2-3) of the Turkish Historical Review.

During his time at the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies at SFU, he will be finalizing his book manuscript as well as working on another project on Karamanlidika, Turkish written in Greek letters, as a transcultural phenomenon translation as a transcultural activity with a particular emphasis on the intellectual biography of Evangelinos Misailidis.