Allied Occupied Istanbul and the Ottoman War Crimes Tribunals, 1919-20
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Speaker
Erdag Goknar
This talk reexamines the Ottoman Extraordinary Military Tribunals (1919–20) in Allied-occupied Istanbul, which sought to prosecute atrocities against Armenians. Archival fragments from the trials reveal both the limits of law and the cultural afterlives of genocide, documenting state violence, survivor experiences, and the enduring role of these discredited tribunals in shaping memory and nation-building.
Presenter:
Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish and former director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center. He is a scholar of literary and cultural studies and an award-winning translator whose research focuses on the intersections of literature and politics; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in modern and contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture. His recent research examines intersections of law and literature in Allied occupied Istanbul (1928-23).
Moderator and commentator
Kata Gellen is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Her main areas of research and teaching include German literary modernism, German-Jewish studies, postwar Austrian literature and cinema, film studies, and sound studies. She is the author of Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) and numerous essays on writers including Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrud Kolmar, Günther Anders, and Thomas Bernhard, as well as essays on Weimar Cinema. Her book, Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, will be published with the University of Toronto Press in 2026. She is currently writing a book on contemporary transgressive Austrian cinema called Ulrich Seidl, Brutal Humanist.
Categories
Core Faculty