Halil Berktay

Halil Berktay (born August 27, 1947) is a Turkish historian at Ibn Haldun University. He has worked as a columnist for the daily newspaper Taraf and is one of the first Turkish historians to acknowledge the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.

Biography Berktay was born in İzmir into an intellectual Turkish communist family. Both of his parents were Cretan Turks. His father, Erdoğan Berktay, was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey. As a result of this influence, Halil Berktay remained a Maoist for two decades before he became "an independent left-intellectual".

After graduating from Robert College in 1964, Berktay studied economics at Yale University receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and Master of Arts in 1969. He went on to earn a PhD from Birmingham University in 1990. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1997, and taught at Sabancı University before returning to Harvard in 2006. He is currently a professor at Ibn Haldun University, where he is also the head of the History Department.

Berktay's research areas are the history and historiography of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He studies social and economic history (including that of Europe, especially medieval history) from a comparative perspective. He has also written on the construction of Turkish national memory. In September 2005, Berktay and fellow historians, including Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem and Selim Deringil, convened at an academic conference to discuss the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Partial bibliography Kabileden Feodalizme, Kaynak Yayınları, 1983 Cumhuriyet İdeolojisi ve Fuad Köprülü, Kaynak Yayınları, 1983 Bir Dönem Kapanırken, Pencere Yayınları, 1991 New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History (eds. Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi),