Back	At the Making of Modern Turkey Seminars: Historical Writings from Abdülhamid II to the Present This month, at the Making of Modern Turkey Seminars - presented by the Ottoman Bank Museum on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Turkish Republic - the topic is historiography, beginning from the period of Sultan Abdülhamid II, to the present. Assist. Prof. Ahmet Kuyaş, from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Galatasaray University, will be our guest speaker at the seminar scheduled for Saturday, April 17, 2004, from 2:30 to 5:00 p.m. "Examining our methods for writing history, how we perceive it, and the changes in focus and emphasis that have occured in the body of historical writings produced over roughly a century, we aim to provide a tentative overview and a general evaluation, both of turning-points in Turkish politics and of the Turkish public's expectations at different phases over time" says Assist. Prof. Ahmet Kuyaş. "You could actually say this is a paper on 'the history of writing history'." Kuyaş, who specializes in 19th and 20th century Ottoman-Turkish history, was born in Istanbul, in 1952. After earning a history degree in France, he received a Ph.D. in history in Canada. The topic of his Ph.D. thesis was an interpretation of Şevket Süreyya Aydemir's Türk Devrimi (Turkish Revolution). He was lecturer at Princeton University and assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College (Massachusett), and then returned to Turkey, where, since 1997, he has been a faculty member of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Galatasaray University, in addition to conducting master and doctoral classes at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, at Boğaziçi University. Organized in association with Boğaziçi University on the theme "Continuity and Disruption in the Turkish Republic" and held on the third Saturday of each month, the seminars involve a general assessment of the past century, followed by a historical discussion of the transformations triggered by the Republic. All 9 seminars focus on issues concerning the state, relations between the individual and civil society, the concept of citizenship, financial and economic change, interventionist and liberal structures, legal order, basic rights and liberties, cultural and artistic progress and the understanding of modernity. The seminars which aim to bring together scholars from different arenas are held in two sessions. Following the presentation of individual papers in the first session, the active participation of the audience in the ensuing discussions is encouraged, in the second session. It is planned to later publish the papers, presented at the seminars, in the form of a book.