Interview with Taner Akçam, Associate Professor of History at Clark University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on November 8, 2010.Professor Akçam is the author of A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, published by Metropolitan Press in 2006.
Interview Themes
How Akçam came to be a scholar of genocide (00:47)
Why the study of genocide has been so prevalent and controversial in the past 20 years (10:12)
Akçam's arrest and the issues that brought him into politics in the 1970s (16:09)Why the study of genocide has been so prevalent and controversial in the past 20 years (10:12)
How Akçam saw the Turkish state in the 1970s (20:48)
Early responses to the work of Akçam on the Armenian issue (26:12)
Retrospective view of the aspirations of the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey (30:08)
The next generation of intellectuals in Turkey and elsewhere and their relationship to ideology (34:53)
The impact of the current preoccupation with memory on contemporary politics (42:20)
Dangers of the politics of grievance (48:08)
Akçam's interest in writing about Islam (54:13)
Aspects of Turkish national consciousness that historians should concern themselves with (1:01:28)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/21954
