Back	This month at Objects and Rituals The Making of Modern Turkey Seminars, presented by the Ottoman Bank Museum in association with Boğaziçi University and the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, focus this season on the various "isms" which emerged during the 20th century, and their impact on Republican Turkey. Prof. Zafer Toprak, director of the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, will be our guest speaker at this month's seminar, scheduled for Saturday, October 15, 2005, from 2:30 to 5:00 p.m. Zafer Toprak, who will address in detail the impact of populism in the Republican era, briefly summarizes the concept: "Populism is one of the most complex concepts in the current literature of the social sciences. It first emerged in Russia as an ideology, then acquired political identity as a category in political science, finally, economic, cultural and even artistic populism became a topic of debate. In early Republican Turkey, populism entered the literature as a 'people's' movement, took on a different form during the multiparty period, and in the 1970s, was considered an application of the 'import substitution' economic model." Prof. Zafer Toprak was born in 1946. After graduating in 1969 from the Department of International Relations in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ankara University, he completed a master's degree in economic history at the University of London, in 1971.He then obtained his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Economics at Istanbul University, in 1981. Toprak currently teaches economic and social history in late Ottoman and contemporary Turkey, at Boğaziçi University. Toprak, who is also founding chair and director of the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, has published a number of books and more than 150 articles, in Turkish, English, French and German, on the economic, social and cultural histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.